Hello. My name is Sumukh and this is my Innovator website. The whole point of the Innovator project was to give the students the freedom to do what they are passionate about in the form of a graded project. The students are supposed to create their own schedules, content, and rubrics and grade themselves accordingly.

You can see the game by clicking here. Because of technicalities that I do not have control over, the game will not work on Google Chrome or Microsoft Edge.

PROCESS

I chose the idea for this project because I have really enjoyed playing video games since I was a child. I have always tried to create some of my own so I can spread the joy that I felt when I played video games. I started out with making them in basic programs like GameMaker, but I always lost motivation and left those games unfinished. For this project, the idea was that if the game was going to be graded then I do not have an option to just leave it.

One of the main challenges I had for my project was to learn Unity. Unity is a Game Making program and is one of the best free tools available. Because this program is industry standard it has a lot of content that we had to learn. A simple process for creating an object went as follows: creating a sprite or an image for the object, creating the object and assigning the sprite to it, creating a script for the object which includes all the code, key inputs, etc, and finally adding animation controllers to the sprite. We had to learn all of that from scratch, as we had no experience with Unity before this project. The fact that we had to put in so much effort just to be able to potentially create something gave this project so much meaning for me because otherwise it would've been just us doing something that we had prior experience with, and it would not have been challenging enough.

I decided to do my project with Jiale Wan, as we had the same project idea in mind, and we thought that we could combine our skills to make a better product. We figured out that individually we had a few flaws that would make our games not as appealing. For example, Jiale did not have much experience with creating sprites and writing AI code, and I had did not have much experience with doing music and level design. So for the project we grouped up and did the parts that the other could not do, along with coordinating to create the main part of the game, which we could both do. Overall, I think that it was a very successful collaboration as we both substituted for each other's weaknesses.

If I could do my project over, I would try to reduce the complexity of my project, by maybe having fewer mechanics, or by having a simpler story. Doing that would let me have more time to work on the actual game, rather than thinking up a story or spending time writing dialogues or drawing sprites.

The 21st Century Skill I most improved on is Technological Literacy because my entire project was done through different programs like Unity, Photoshop, etc. The skill I least improved upon is probably Social and Civic Responsibility, as our project did not really affect the community in any significant way.

Probably the biggest learning experience I got from this project was that I got to experience how to plan a large scale project completely. We had to plan every aspect of our game on our own, from deciding on the mechanics, the gameplay, the story, the music, the sprites, etc, and we also had to figure out how we are going to execute all these plans. I believe that this project has definitely given me a head start for when I have to plan projects in a real-world situation.

I have learnt a lot this semester, not only about various programs but also about planning, organizing, etc. I think that all the research I have done about Unity is definitely going to help me sometime in the future, as there is a really good chance that I will end up in the video game industry after college. Even if I don't do a profession in game making, it is a dream of mine to create a full-fledged indie game and the things I have learnt this semester will help me extensively for that. I have also had significant experience coding in C++ this semester, as all our code for Unity was written in that. C++ is one of the most widely used languages in the world, and since I will be going into some sort of coding profession, I believe that this has been an excellent tutorial for me. Overall, I think that whatever I have learnt from the innovator project has proved more valuable to me than anything else I have learnt this semester.

This project has been one of the best works of art I have ever created, and hence this is always going to be a huge milestone for me. The innovator project was my first step into planning a project on my own, and it was a great experience, as before this project I was used to instructions being given to me for everything. It felt liberating to control my decisions on my own and be responsible for my own actions, and I think that was important because this experience will be very similar to what adulthood must feel like, and I am glad that I had an opportunity to take a peek into it beforehand.