Week 4 Reflection

We started the week off by learning Unity. I imported my model from Blender into Unity and got to mess around with the asset store where I downloaded other farm animals to accompany my pig. The thing that blew my mind was learning how to attach a script to an object. I always wondered how coding is involved in game development and now that connection has been realized. I managed to make my pig move and jump based on what I press on my keyboard. I also added a button on screen that I can press with my mouse to turn on/off the light. I even incorporated collision to my fence and gravity to my animals to make them all roam around the house without escaping or falling through the ground. Though, by making my pig jump, he did manage to go over the fence and fall into the abyss (bye bye piggy). Overall, I had a lot of fun with Unity, and it made my research project much more clearer in terms of how we are going to develop our game.

Following our Unity course sessions, we began having Deeper Dive, and here, I got place into the machine learning group where so far we’ve gone over the basic concepts, the different types of data that can be analyzed, and how to code in python where we make use of libraries such as pandas. With this being my first time studying machine learning, I think I managed to gain a good idea on what machine learning is, and I’m excited to delve deeper into it in the following weeks.

For our luncheon lectures, Stephen Gilbert and Cody Fleming joined us to speak about career paths and provide insight on life as a graduate student. I found these talks to be very engaging. I enjoyed hearing about Stephen’s academic journey and the different people he met that all guided him to where he is today. His time at Namibia was also really interesting and made me start thinking about studying abroad. I appreciate the time Cody took to answer any of our questions. He provided more information on a graduate student’s workload and their dynamic with their mentor, creating a clearer connection between our experience here as interns and that of a graduate student. One thing that I’ve enjoyed from all these luncheon lectures is having Heliya or Imtiajul with us as I’m always reminded that they’re still students, and I’m glad that they can listen to and ask questions regarding research and possible opportunities to pursue.

The thing I enjoyed doing the most this week at VRAC was working on our research project. We were given the task to create a narrative for our game, and so I went crazy and started spewing out any idea I had. By hearing feedback from Kris and Curtis alongside the inspiration I gained from watching our mentors play games, I was able to develop a plot centered around the themes from our literature review. Kris did an amazing job at drawing sketches to visualize our game, and Curtis was of great help as we discussed game mechanics. My favorite day was Friday when we held a 3 hour meeting with everyone in our research group, including Kimberly who just got back from her trip. All 8 of us discussed the game, providing new ideas and making sense of what we’ve worked on so far. As we ate lunch and shared more about our lives, I felt like we were one big family, so it felt sad to see Evrim leave, but at least she’ll be back by August with Kimberly staying with us until then. I’m looking forward to working with everyone in incorporating these new ideas to flesh out our game, and, most of all, meeting the two Storm Lake students which I’m sure will be a fun time for them.