More ARIS, Yet FINAL, Thoughts

Game development is no easy task. Who would have thought? And here I thought after spending a few hours on a MOOC for coding I would have an easy time.

So I was inspired to use ARIS for my group project in developing a game for this class. I assumed it would be intuitive and relatively straightforward in creating. After playing through a couple of games in preparation for class, I was definitely sold on doing this.

Once we began the group project, my group agreed that ARIS would be a good platform to use, and that we would create something that worked well with this. And so we began planning what our project would be with ARIS in mind. Basically, since ARIS is a location-based GPS game, we would focus on utilizing locations here in Hawaii within our game and project. We wanted to do something impactful, so narrowed in on caring for the community and environment.

Communities and environment are inherently location-based, so this seemed like it would work well together. This is where things grew incredibly difficult, as ARIS is not a well-developed platform. There is an ARIS Community that provides tutorials, but this time consuming process has me really appreciating game development in general. It’s not like I’m creating something completely from scratch, but rather have a community and platform to work from.

Regardless, we have to have a prototype for our project. I am not trying to put it on blast or make excuses, but ours will be extremely limited. We put a lot of energy in planning our our project first, as we need this in order to have a prototype in the first place. The prototype, then, is going to be so basic as to really just be demonstrative of what the project could be. It is still a skeleton of what it could be, and I know I wish it could be better. Alas, it makes me covet skills that could have led to a better development of this prototype, but that is not in my hand at this moment in time.

This has been an interesting and challenging semester, and ending it with this project is appropriate as it reflects both of those adjectives well. Here’s to the summer quickly approaching, and to bring my blog posts full circle: Cheers!