Making Delver has been a valuable learning experience and I look forward to making more in the future.

Additions:

1. First Person View
2. Several New Props
3. Added a new room with a platforming challenge
4. JUICE

Mechanics:

1. Basic First Person Walking and Jumping
2. Keys and Doors – obtain keys to unlock doors and advance
3. Gold Collectibles – glorious gold
4. Floor Traps – damage the player when walked on
5. Wall Switch – floor switch that causes walls to magically appear and disappear

Jordan Bogaards

09/24/2020

Delver – An Adventure Platformer Game

Feedback:

1. I’m a fan of the aesthetic! However, I don’t think your current character meshes well with the environment.
2. I think a classic puzzle that uses floor switches like you have here is a maze-like environment where there are plenty of doors that open/close, leaving the player to figure out which switches they actually should press and in what order.
3. I do think a puzzle game would gel better than a pure adventure game.
4. Largely I think giving the player more environment to see/making the camera further out would be beneficial.
5. I do agree that a new movement controller would work better with the format than the current/default.
6. Other: The camera tends to get very jittery when walking over the floor tiles due to their unevenness. If possible I would remove individual colliders for then in favor of box colliders for whole rooms.

I really like the aesthetic, it looks really cool and medieval

I think a good puzzle would be needing 3 keys for a door, and there are multiple switches that change which doors open what like in the level, and you need to press them accordingly and change which ones you press to get all of the keys

I think a puzzle game is more suited for this type of game

I think the camera could be lower so you could see more up ahead, there were multiple times where the camera got obstructed behind a wall or something similar and it was a bit annoying to deal with

Yes definitely, the movement is a little weird and can be hard to gauge how far a jump can go and I think that more stiff and responsive controls would make this game a lot better

1. Map looks good, but the character needs to be changed to fit the aesthetic
2. I think the pressure plate idea is good, it just needs more fleshing out and perhaps be more maze-like to confuse the player
3. It was more puzzle like than adventure
4. I think raising the camera to be more above the player would go along way. I didn’t know that I was able to rotate the camera, so there were a lot of times where I couldn’t see the player character.
5. Definitely. I’m not a fan of the default system. It feels too floaty and unresponsive in any of the games I’ve played that have used it.

Planned Changes:

1. First Person Camera – players found the camera to be a major issue with how small the environments are, with walls often getting in the way. A change to first person would likely improve this drastically.
2. More Stiff and Reactive Movement – the players found the movement was really hard to control when platforming so I plan to make less of a momentum based system and more instant movement with a short time from 0 to 100% speed.
3. Add More Puzzles – pretty self explanatory, planning to combine and stipulate more on my mechanics.
4. Splitting Path – I got a lot of people saying it felt very linear, so I plan to add some more exploration elements.
5. Tutorial – Add some way to communication the controls in the game itself
6. Add Sounds
7. Add Trap and Switch Models
8. Add UI Elements
9. More Polish and “Juice”
10. Win/Loss State

Jordan Bogaards

09/02/2020

Diggity Dungeons and All That: You play as a Rogue after the most important thing in the world loot. You know what has loot? Dungeons! Now get in there, solve puzzles with your sneaky skills, and get yourself some loot.

Jordan Bogaards

Week of  4 May – 10 May

1. What did you like the least about the class?

The tests felt kind of unnecessary, somewhat similar to Computer Science UIL tests in that the contents didn’t really matter all that much.

2. What did you like the most about the class?

The project was very fun and a great learning experience. I would honestly consider taking the class again just for that.

3. What’s the most significant thing you learned?

Working together in software development. I’ve always done better just working on my own instead of in groups, but this course taught me how to communicate with my teammates better and the experience of working with others in development. This will be very useful for when I get into game development as communication will be very important there.

4. How many hours a week did you spend coding/debugging/testing for this class?

On average probably 10 hours a week. The latter half of the project became a lot less time intensive, but the beginning required a lot more time and effort since we had to start and learn everything from scratch.

5. How many hours a week did you spend reading/studying for this class?

Maybe 5 hours or so. The exams weren’t too difficult and the readings were fairly short.

6. How many lines of code do you think you wrote?

I couldn’t even begin to guess, but if I had to put a number probably over 1000.

7. What required tool did you not know and now find very useful?

Postman is very nice for making APIs, I’ll probably use it again if I do another web development project.

8. What’s the most useful Web dev tool that your group used that was not required?

React-bootstrap was really useful for getting started. Its very simple system was nice for someone completely new to web development and helped me to learn a lot about it.

9. How did you feel about your group having to self-teach many, many technologies?

It was both frustrating and interesting. Strangely, finding resources to learn the stuff was more difficult than expected but in the end everything worked out I suppose.

10. How did you feel about the two-stage quizzes and tests?

I like the collaborative aspect of both, was honestly kind of fun to just discuss the material with friends.

11. How did you feel about the cold calling, in the end?

Its both kind of frustrating and a really cool way to interact with the class since Downing is so forgiving with it. Honestly though, as someone with major social anxiety but also as someone who likes to answer questions when he’s feeling confident enough it was very frustrating. The possibility of being called out of the blue was a constant source of stress until I was finally called and could relax after. I remember on one of the first days I really wanted to answer a question that the cold called student was having trouble with, but Downing doesn’t seem to like the phone a friend option, despite waiting for around a minute in silence. After raising my hand for a bit my nerves got to me and I blurted out the answer and Downing responded “yes, but you’re not ____”. I still feel embarrassed about it typing this out now, though I know no one else cares nor remembers the event. Also one particularly frustrating day, I had been unlucky enough to get cold called twice, once earlier in the class and once right after the list reset. Despite all of this I think its a good way to interact with the class, but I think it would be nice to let others step in more often if it seems the student is having trouble.

Jordan Bogaards

Week of  27 Apr – 3 May

1. What did you do this past week?

Suffered, Graphics didn’t go much better than before and lets just say I’m not proud of the grade that’ll come out of that assignment. Other than that, Software Engineering was fairly pleasant this week, just seeing everyone’s sites was pretty cool and the feedback was nice, though I did get a bit of performance anxiety despite it being a video.

2. What’s in your way?

Finals, finals, finals. Finals are gonna be the main wall this week, but I plan to overcome them quickly and smoothly to make up for my Graphics mishap.

3. What will you do next week?

Mostly study for the finals and finish off the final assignment for Software Engineering. Other than that maybe take some breaks with some friends to help maintain my sanity.

4. What was your experience of the presentations?

The presentations were pretty fun. I enjoyed watching them all and seeing the near final forms of everyone’s websites. I believe ours turned out well and hope that it left a good impression for our parkprotection.me.

5. What made you happy this week?

My partner and I have started our final in Graphics and its looking pretty fun. I’m enjoying figuring out how to facilitate structured random generation. I also finally got to play some more D&D. I have been absolutely starved for table top board games and rpgs and its a breath of fresh air to get back into it.

6. What’s your pick-of-the-week or tip-of-the-week?

My tip-of-the-week is to make sure you take breaks. I know from experience that studying too hard can get you wired up like a spring, but after that incident I’ve learned to study diligently, but also make sure to destress and avoid any unnecessary strain on the body. School is important, but your sanity is more so.

Jordan Bogaards

Week of  2 Mar – 8 Mar

1. What did you do this past week?

Finished work on the website for the week, progress has been very satisfying for that as of recent. Unfortunately the same cannot be said for Graphics.

2. What’s in your way?

Graphics has been incredibly troublesome since the quarantine began. The projects are built to be used mostly in linux, but SSH is not a good option for them. So as someone who owns a windows machine, setup has been incredibly difficult and frustrating to where my partner and I have spent far more time trying to get the code to run on our machines over making actual progress on the assignment. It hasn’t helped that my partner is moving, so working on it together has been frustratingly difficult.

3. What will you do next week?

Get through the next part of the website and hopefully complete the graphics project as well. Other than that I need to start prepping for class registration and making sure I graduate next year.

4. What was your experience of more SQL?

I have mixed feelings on SQL. I think a lot of it is very intuitive and pretty cool honestly, but its definitely one of the weirder programming languages I’ve encountered.

5. What made you happy this week?

Our website actually made me pretty happy this week. This was definitely the smoothest portion we’ve had so far. Everything was done fairly early and cleanly, definitely very satisfying. Outside of that I’ve picked Sekiro back up and the combat is just as satisfying as I remembered. The sound of a parry will always make me feel proud of my progress in the game.

6. What’s your pick-of-the-week or tip-of-the-week?

My pick-of-the-week is the Boss Keys series of videos by Game Makers Toolkit. These videos analyzes the dungeons of games such as the Zelda series and the Metroid series to give insights on those series and their evolution, as well as dungeon design in general. The video below analyzes the design in The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past (my personal favorite Zelda game).

Jordan Bogaards

Week of  2 Mar – 8 Mar

1. What did you do this past week?

Worked on my three projects and did basic classwork. Our progress on the projects have been rather lackluster unfortunately, and we’ve been confused on how to implement all the different things we are trying. We’re working our way bit by bit though and hopefully we can complete them on time.

2. What’s in your way?

All these projects are really making it hard to organize around all three of my groups. I’ve been doing my best, but outside of one of them, it feels like I’m not getting enough work in to do my fair share.

3. What will you do next week?

I’ll keep doing what I can to support each of my groups, while also preparing for the exams this week. Trying to figure out how we can build a page for the site through methods so we can implement pagination properly, we have the pagination bar working, but making the new pages is a work in progress.

4. What was your experience of =, *, **, and decorators?

I found them to be really fascinating in their different uses, especially in that they make effectively infinite input functions a possibility. I am a bit confused on the use of something like (*t, z), as I get that you have to pass by name for the z, but what advantage do you get from this? It could lead to more readable code I presume, but I highly doubt that is the purpose of this functionality. Decorators are also pretty neat, and are especially useful for debugging, which for some reason I enjoy.

5. What made you happy this week?

The group I usually play board games with and I had our second attempt at the Arkahm Horror LCG this weekend and found it to be much more satisfying than our first adventure into it. The first time scenarios were very difficult and frustrating, but this time I think we were experienced enough with the game to know what to expect and managed to plan around and perfectly execute two scenarios. It was a very fun time.

Jordan Bogaards

Week of 24 Feb – 1 Mar

1. What did you do this past week?

I mainly worked on projects day-in to day-out everyday, outside of attending classes. I swear the pattern of the carpet of the 3rd floor lab in the GDC is totally ingrained in my brain forever now and looking at it makes me nauseous. I suppose its good I’m already used to crunch mode since I want to go into the game industry.

2. What’s in your way?

Graphics has been very difficult for my teammate and I, and it has taken up a majority of our time throughout the week. Often there are days where we make little to no progress and it has been incredibly frustrating at times, but we are making it through as best we can. Unfortunately, this has also made it difficult to work with my group on our Software Engineering project, but I’ve made some time to ensure I can at least get my fair share in.

3. What will you do next week?

Need to get started on the next graphics project as well as make progress on the next stage of the website.

4. What was your experience of comprehensions, generators, and yield?

I didn’t have prior experience with them, but my experience with them in class has been enjoyable. Though I do still find them somewhat strange, I also find them really interesting and like to think of different ways to apply them. Yields I probably found the most interesting, but generators are also quite cool. Lazy generators can be problematic if you aren’t careful, but they can also be very helpful at the same time.

5. What made you happy this week?

Seeing my code finally compile and run nearly brought a tear to my eye, unfortunately we weren’t able to totally finish though. Also getting together some of the instance pages for the website was very satisfying, the carousel, though (mostly) simple to implement, was a very good feeling. Outside of projects I finally got to retire my summon character in Gloomhaven this weekend, which was satisfying if not a little sad, but the new character I’m playing looks really cool and I’m looking forward to digging further into his mechanics. Also I’m finally getting to play a D&D session for the first time in several months, which I’m very excited for.

Jordan Bogaards

Week of 17 Feb – 23 Feb

1. What did you do this past week?

I’ve once again been really busy this past week. My partner and I had to finish up a project by Wednesday which we spent many many hours working on Sunday through Wednesday. After that I had 2 exams on Thursday and Friday respectively, so I had to study and take those. Then I worked with my group on our project for this course throughout the weekend to make up for my being unavailable through the week. We actually made some good progress that I’m happy with, but we still have a lot of work to do.

2. What’s in your way?

Just so many projects. It honestly feels like I haven’t had a good break for a while now. React has made creating initial things very easy, but getting finer details has been really difficult. It doesn’t help that I have no experience in web development prior to this project, but we are figuring it out.

3. What will you do next week?

Work on projects more I guess, have to implement k-d trees and anti-aliasing for graphics by Wednesday, as well as finishing up stage one of our website project. Need to integrate the site with GitLab and clean up our formatting.

4. What was your experience of iteration, AWS, and Chef Secure?

AWS didn’t seem to bad as described in class, but it has led to some frustrations for our group and thus we have yet to implement https into the site as well as getting the site properly linked to our cheapnames domain. Hopefully we’ll figure it out relatively quickly and get everything done in time for Thursday.

5. What made you happy this week?

Making progress on our site and my graphics project was pretty satisfying after spending quite a while trying to figure it out, especially for the graphics project, though I still wish we could have done better.

Jordan Bogaards

Week of 10 Feb – 16 Feb

1. What did you do this past week?

Finished up Collatz and worked hard on my other two projects. Its been strenuous because its essentially been non-stop work.

2. What’s in your way?

Really been struggling with my Graphics project. Progress has been sparse and we are just plain stuck. Its going to be a mad dash to finish the project before its deadline, but I’m sure we’ll figure it out somehow.

3. What will you do next week?

I need to meet with my group for our second project in this class, I’ve gotta finish my Graphics project as well as start on our second project in Graphics, start a 4th project of the week with another group, pass both a History and an Algorithms exam, and get some minor homework done.

4. What was your experience of Project #1: Collatz?

Overall not too difficult. I had some issues here and there and the submission requirements had me confused, forcing me to ask some questions and get some clarifications for it. The code itself was relatively easy, which was some weight off my back. I enjoyed seeing the differences in speed, and creating the meta cache, acceptance tests, and unit tests I actually found rather fun.

5. What made you happy this week?

Unfortunately this week has been very tough for me. I’ve had quite a few projects that have been pretty work intensive, and my partner and I have struggled to make good progress on one of them which is due on the oncoming week. However, my friends and I are playing a game called Gloomhaven and are quickly approaching unlocking my next character which has given me something to look forward to next weekend.