I Didn’t Know This Was A Math Class.

This was, of course, one of the more interesting projects I’ve had the opportunity to work on during my time here at DePaul. Other classes have touted how they promote team environments and projects but this was the first time I feel like that promise was really met. Especially when it came to working with other programmers.

I have done team projects in the past with designers and artists and it’s a very different dynamic when you have other programmers on your team as well. Suddenly my little code domain was full of other people. Everything I designed had to be readable and usable by my fellow programmers and vice versa. Especially when it came time to combine all the work we had been doing. Making everything work while throwing around all our respective APIs was an adventure.

However my greatest challenge throughout this whole capstone process was math. I was put in charge of creating our gravity/slingshot mechanic. The gravity that acts like a slingshot that acts like gravity but not really. It went through many iterations. At one point it was a fairly accurate interpretation of gravity. Where the planets would wind up just dragging the player in if they got too close. in another iteration we saw what was more like a slipstream, where the player would enter in one side and quickly speed up and be funneled out the other. Eventually I think I found a fairly happy coupling of the two. However this development process pushed my knowledge of linear algebra to a point I have never experienced before.

For example, wanted the gravity to flow in the direction the Player was facing when they entered the planetary field of gravity. And honestly I think that it would take up too much space here to describe that whole process. But it wound up being spending a lot of time on the whiteboard or paper just working out relationships between vectors and how to manipulate those to get what we want. Now this concept is of course not that crazy. However in the past there was always some formula or rule to fall back on. But here I was on my own for the first time. The internet failed to provide me with similar enough examples so I was left to wrestle around with the math.

And every breakthrough on this front was both fantastic and heartbreaking. The feeling of truly figuring out something on your own is fantastic. However then immediately being confronted with play-testers who don’t like it and having to go back to the drawing board was always disappointing. But the constant revisiting of the same problem taught me some valuable lessons in perseverance and improved my ability to take criticism and use it to improve myself and what I made.