Final Post

Over the course of this ... half year? I guess. I have learned a lot. We have gone over quite a few things and I have discovered a few new skills within  myself. I'm honestly happy that I have taken this course because it has opened my eyes to the gaming world and its difficulties. I've only scratched the surface as well! It has been a really great experience overall. Though here is what I learned. 

Ok now this bit might disappoint my teacher, but I must say when it comes to coding I feel like I haven't learned half as much as she wanted. I don't know learning languages has never been a strong suite of mine, coding or otherwise. Anyways I still understand the basics like I should so I'm at least happy with that. Also I'm decent at reading code just not at writing it so at least I can tell what is going on when someone shows me something. Furthermore I have also learned that coding is a lot more complex and simple than I originally thought. It's not necessarily hard per say, but instead a lot of busy work and effort. You have to write a lot of lines to get things to work properly. That's about it with coding though. 

Now we come to the next thing I didn't really have too much trouble with, Unity. A lot of the coders in my class complained about Unity, it seems like it can be very frustrating. Since my focus was on the art I never really had that problem. I only had issues with some files changing colors, but if I saved it as a PNG then everything is fine. Also it's has a lot of cool features, but since I just followed tutorials the only thing I really learned was the interface. I will have to look at Unity a bit more to learn the ins and outs though. I'm still pretty happy with what I have learned though. 

Now this is where I learned the most, ART! Digital art is a wonderful, terrible, frustrating and rewarding world. It's all those things and more. I think the most important thing I learned from crash testing Photoshop and Fireworks was that layers are the most important thing EVER! The more layers you have the easier everything becomes. It's almost silly how much easier it becomes. Also I learned that our school's WACOM tablets might need an upgrade because they only go up to windows 7. If we plan to get windows 10 or 8 we might need to look into that. Also I learned that for now I prefer a slow mouse to a drawing tablet. I was able to get things done faster and they looked better. So that's that. I also think I learned a lot about the hotkeys in PS. It really speeds your work along. I had never really used hotkeys too much until then. Another important thing I learned was that making realistic art is difficult, if you have only a few days to work on it. Even weeks didn't feel like enough. I also learned that a good assets list is a god send. If I ever plan on making a game that will be the first thing I make sure is complete. The amount of changes my partner made to the game made two weeks of work a waste of time. If I had that I would have been done. Oh well though, you can't change the past. So yeah that was my art experience. 

In general I think the overall lesson that is to be taken from this is that making a solid game is hard. It requires a dedicated team that spends hours to make sure everything is done right. It takes a lot of effort basically. No part of the team is really easy either. Sure some parts are easier than others when your game focuses on different bits, but it's still not easy. Electronic Game Dev was a lot of fun. The teacher was great, the class was fun and the students were usually a pleasure to be around. I may have had my complaints, but all around it was a solid experience that has opened my eyes to the gaming world around me. That is all. Have a great everyone!