My room has always been full of unfinished art. I couldn’t often finish things if they took to long, I would forget or move on to my next hyper-fixation. Whether it be music, animation, art, I often can’t stay doing the same thing for too long. Enter video games – a medium that requires dozens of small parts, mainly art, music and coding, and animation. I’ve always enjoyed learning about them, watching others play them, and struggling through them myself. One of my many projects on the back burner and a 3d survival game but had never gotten past a concept. My known hobbies worked so well with the medium I decided to try to revive it. After all, people have made games on their own before, with my favourite game- Stardew Valley- being made by one person.

So, against the advice of those on the internet, I dove straight into coding my dream project. Starter projects were often boring and seemed to only teach the code in one very specific use. I had done some tutorials in preparation for the semester, mostly using the app Sololearn and Unity learn, teaching me the basics of C# and the unity engine respectively. Then in February, I jumped straight into making my dream game.

Within the first week of coding, I hit my first of many roadblocks. The unity visual scripting system sucks. Very quickly I learnt that the trade-off for the convenience of the language was its power. So, I had to switch to the non-visual version of unity’s language, C#. I was able to find a ton of resources to using for help during these first few months. As I coded more, I got more confident and less errors would pop up.

As the first few months wrapped up, I didn’t have much to show- I hadn’t done any art or models yet, the world was a void of untextured cubes and flat planes. All my hard work after two months was invisible to the player. And even still at the end of the semester I feel like things are unfinished, especially in regard to the enemy model. I didn’t know enough about the field of 3d modelling to create something that looked exactly how I wanted. I understand that I did my best, but that feeling of accomplishment is bittersweet, wanting to have done so much better.

I am proud of what I’ve accomplished, and I hope to continue to work on my dream game throughout the summer and in my free time. I’ve enjoyed my first semester at propel and cannot wait to continue learning