This is a game made to emulate the PropHunt game mode from the game Gary’s Mod. This project is made using Unity3D, Data Oriented Technology Stack (dots), Dots Physics, and Dots netcode to make a multiplayer game. This is all open source and a learning exercise to better understand Data Oriented Programming.

The project can be found on github here - https://github.com/nicholas-maltbie/PropHunt

This was a great honors project where I learned about data-oriented programming, game design, network coding, collaboration with remote colleagues, and more about GitHub and its design and collaboration features.

Reflection

This is my final honors project. It is right now the winter break for the last semester. This is a universal sentiment, but I had no idea what 2021 had in store and the changes to come this year. Thankfully, I have fared well during this year and have avoided any major injuries or surgeries (Looking at you 2017-2019). It is a bit sad seeing as this is my last honors experience. The process of personally reflecting on experiences has taught me a lot. I have really enjoyed working on these projects and the ability to write down my thoughts and reflect upon them have been invaluable.

As far as the actual honors experience, I learned a lot more than I was expecting. I thought this would be like my first honors experience when I tired to make a game, learn about unity, and 3d modeling. But this one was quite a bit different. Although I set out to make this project on my own, I ended up getting about 10 other people that have helped in adding features, troubleshooting, finding bugs, and experiencing the game. Most of these people were friends I know in person but a few I met online while posting and sharing experiences about the project. My ability to write, reflect, and log experiences has been refined by this project as well as my other honors projects and this skill is invaluable for personal development and growth. I have been seeing a counselor for anxiety and depression the past few years and this experience of talking though issues with someone else and reflecting on mistakes or successes of the past is difficult. I’ve been working on a blog to add posts every week. I missed that milestone but wrote about 10 or so posts over the course of the project (should have had 16 or so total). Here is the website/blog with all the posts. https://nickmaltbie.com/PropHuntDevLog/

Writing the log and having weekly reflections helped me track progress. I learned a lot about GitHub and collaborating with other people as I was able to host my project there https://github.com/nicholas-maltbie/PropHunt. Collaborating with others is quite difficult especially when we only work on the project part time and mostly have jobs, classes, or are otherwise busy. Overall, the experience has taught me a lot of great digital communication methodologies due to COVID and having to communicate online with other people for the project progress. One of the people I am working with I have never met in person but hopefully will be able to meet up with them in Seattle when I graduate, and whenever people can meet in person again (staying at home for now though).

Overall, the project did not hit all the original goals. In fact, we only hit the goals for October… but we did learn a lot about Unity, Data Oriented Programming, and GitHub. I knew that in the original goals were to learn but I am a bit sad that we did not develop all the features and make a working game. Overall, the project is going well, and I hope to continue development into the next year and add more features. Although I did not hit the original goals, I am happy with the current progress and have learned quite a bit throughout the experience by communicating with remote workers and learning about data-oriented programming, network code, and project management.

I made a short video to talk about project on my YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N4uKXMWs4aE I shared this with so colleagues, friends, and my honors advisor. I can learn more about video editing sharing experiences, but I had great feedback from them. I look forward to documenting more features and additions to the project and making technical showcase videos as well as just showing new features and development updates.