My Harvard Game Design Course Experience

Abstract

My original plan for my Senior Individualized Project was to try and do an internship at a tech company to get experience, but COVID-19 had a different plan for me, making it so that every internship I had applied for would fall away due to shutdowns or personnel limits. But this may have been a blessing in disguise, as it allowed me to go back to my love of video games and take a summer course at Harvard, CS50 Introduction to Game Development. The course was an 11-week program, with each week centered on a specific video game such as Bejeweled, Super Mario Brothers, or Portal. I was taught a new language, Lua, which has been used for many different well-known games such as Roblox or the Saints Row Series and applied this language to the engines of Love2D, for simpler 2-Dimensional pixel arts games, and the Unity engine for dipping into the 3rd dimension. Throughout this paper I will go week-by-week and go in-depth into the game we studied, the main learning points we focused on, what project I had to do to change the game or add to it, and how these projects changed how I thought about programming and computer science. Finally, I will explain my process in creating my own game from scratch as the Final Project of the course and the hurdles and challenges I had to overcome.