The group made two games by the end of the SDP deadline. While the games were being coded, however, several milestones had to be reached, and those milestones taught the team just how hard coding can get.
One of the first milestones the team had to reach was deciding which games to make. Initially, the team wanted to make a mmo rpg game that would incorporate several different levels and obstacles that the player would have to go through, and the game would have about five different endings for the different choices that the player would make. This idea was short lived, however, due to the team’s limited ability at the time to code several different story paths and also make it look visually appealing to the audience. So the team reduced their expectations down to a game of connect four with artificial intelligence that would allow the team to get the maximum extra credit points (this would’ve been paired with a simple card game) and be fun to code. However, this idea too, as the team quickly realized, was too ambitious. The coding for the artificial intelligence, as it turns out, was way harder than any of the teammates thought, leading to several failed attempts at a game that cost the team a lot of important time. The team finally decided to go with the games of hangman and over/under, both of which were fairly easy as the teammates had seen those games before.
After the games were chosen, the team still faced several problems due to the inexperience of the group with the coding. The hangman game, which required the Matlab program to graph the hanging man, was giving the team problems by giving inaccurate shapes on the plot that was being drawn. The plot had to be just right so that the head of the hanging man was being drawn in the center of the plot window and was actually followed by the arms and legs of the man. After several attempts at adjusting the graphs, the team was able to get the code to work and get the hanging man to actually look like a man. For the Over/under game, the team was having problems setting up the images and displaying them every turn for the cards that were randomly being picked; this wasted a lot of time for the team as they tried to find the mistake in the code that was stopping the picture of the cards from popping up. After several attempts; however, the team finally was able to get these problems sorted out and learn even more skills in Matlab than they had before.
When the games were done and the final testing had been finished, the team was still burdened with finding the right way to pitch the games to the wider audience. In the video pitch for the SDP, the team couldn’t decide on how to properly advertise the games so that they could get as many points as possible on it. One of the teammates wanted hangman to be the main focus of the pitch, while the other wanted it to be Over/under. The ensuing debate finally lead to a compromise where the group decided to give each game a roughly equal amount of time so that none of them were underrepresented, as both those games were worth the same two complexity scores.
In the end, after five weeks of hard work and a lot of coding, the team was proud of what they had accomplished. The team had realized that working and coding on a game isn’t as easy as it looks, and that careful consideration must be given to the time allotted to finish the project. The team also learned the value of learning from others, as many aspects of the project included people being open to others’ ideas and allowing others to critique their own opinions on the project. The team also learned a lot about the value of documenting all their meeting notes and project progressions, which allowed them to keep track of the due dates for the assignments that were set for them. Overall, the team had a lot of fun making these games and learned a lot of lessons, both in coding and teamwork.