Project Concept
My midterm project is based on a concept I wrote in The Gazelle a few years ago: Drowning At NYUAD: Finding Space In A Ceaseless Work Culture. The article discusses the at times unhealthy work and hustle culture of NYUAD students, where a lack of sleep, overloading classes, and extracurricular commitments can be used as a metric of how “successful,” you are.
The midterm game aims to exaggerate the absurdity of it–underscoring the need to find a personal work-life balanace that enables you to enjoy (and not just survive) your undergraduate career.
Design
The game is designed to parallel mobile games, where a character is dragged along the bottom of the screen–launching projectiles towards oncoming enemies. Except, instead of enemies, the character will be defeating NYUAD-specific monsters, like SIG Training, homework all-nighter, readings, etc.
Prior to playing the game, the user will be presented with several screens that allow for customization. Specifically, the user will need to select a character and an academic weapon from a list of three options each. Below includes screenshots of the game storyboarding, designed in Figma.
Key Risks
One of the aspects that I am most concerned about is the number of screens involved in the game. To alleviate the potential issues and minimize complexity, I am going to work to encapsulate each screen as a class object, with a
.hide() and .show() method. This way, the code may stay maintainable and navigable. I may also opt to include a configuration dataclass object, to pass to each scene as a reference, in order to avoid defining many global configuration variables.