Weekly Journal

Week 1:

First week of this new class has been overwhelming. I joined this class hoping it would help me learn game theory, or the design aspects of game development (balance, how to make a system players will want to actually use, making things enjoyable to engage with ect) So far I dont believe this class will cover the subject matter I hoped it would. First off, the instructor encouraging his students to use """AI""" programs was very disappointing to see and hear, as while these are useful tools for getting unique "rough drafts" of things, they do not have any other current use in industry, art assets they create cannot be copyrighted, and use of generated code will become unfixable when something breaks, as the individual who prompted the code will not be familiar with the code's actual function, and will have to spend more time fixing and understanding the function of generated code, when they could have simply written it themselves, and spent less time combing through lines of "close enough" and possibly re-writing the code wholesale, and instead move on to other parts of development. Additionally, the instructor saying to "simply look up a walkthrough or other youtube video" if the student encounters errors with there programming worries me, as someone who has struggled immensely with what is apparently quite basic programming in the past, I wonder if this is a class I am even capable of taking yet.

The textbook seems decent so far. Lots of this is advice I have heard before in someway or another, but it's good advice, so it's not like thats an issue. Plus, the author is making an "intro level" book, so they need to assume that they are working with someone who has no previous knowledge of gamedev. I disagree with the author's branding of the Sims and pre-End update minecraft as "Toys and not games" seemingly because they lack a defined "loss" state, (Minecraft VERY MUCH had a "loss state" pre-End, it's called death) and the Sims "having no goal" is also a strange thing to say, as much like real life, in the Sims the "goal" is to have a good life (unless the player want another outcome) and propagate your bloodline, but that is a routine issue with defining base concepts like "a game" or "what is fun", so I suppose it is at least sparking discussion, witch is a good thing in and of itself.

Unfortunately, after getting a little bit of progress done in the tutorial for Unity, Unity updated, and something about this broke my script and the progress i had made, despite it all working fine the previous day, and elements that had previously been present had vanished. Thankfully I was not too far along, but I do need to now restart my progress from the beginning of the video (hopefully it will go slightly faster as I still have my physical notes ect) which is somewhat demoralizing. Hopefully I can learn to set up version control or something like it that can keep this from happening and allow me to simply reload from a backup instead of starting over.

Week 2:

Our textbook saying the '84 Dune adaptation is "too weird" has made me instantly dislike the author. It immediately gives me an idea of what kind of person he is. An uncreative person who would never do anything considered "weird" or "odd" because he is bound by social convention to absurd degree. This man is not the kind of person I want to be, as a human being. maybe thats harsh, but I dont know if I can trust someone like this. Another "golden" line from our textbook "Dark Souls’ theme? “Good versus evil.” lol, infact, lmao. A very shallow man has written this book. Its not even a good example of story linking with gameplay, Dark soul's gameplay and world is about struggle, not some binary "good v evil" story. Little Bro probably thinks Gwyn was a good person lmao.

I have hit my first REAL roadblock in this class. Ive put in the code for spawning in pipes correctly (Ive been over it 3 or 4 times by now, its all correct) but it does what its supposed fix. The code I have in should spawn in pipes at regular intervals, but instead spawns them all in on each frame, evan though thats not supposed to happen with this code. And class isn't until Thursday so I dont have anyone to ask for help until then.