The Roads Untraveled

At the beginning of my CSC290 journey, I introduced myself as an Ambivert. An ambivert that wanted to benefit from both qualities of introversion and extroversion. I told myself that there was only one goal in mind that I wanted to achieve before finishing the course. This was to travel the roads untraveled.

I still remember the first day when we were all introduced to our group members for the project. Everyone was shy, and no one really wanted to take a leadership role on the team. I found the atmosphere to be tense at first, as it was evident that none of us were used to the situation presented to us. Nonetheless, I really wanted to achieve a good mark in the course, so I took the opportunity by opening up and taking the leadership role. I used humor to ease the tension surrounding the environment, and eventually everyone else started to become comfortable as well.

Unluckily for us, we were the last group to choose our video game concept, and thus our top 5 ideas were all already taken by other groups. We decided to base our game around the board game Othello, which none of us heard of before. I was really disappointed about the result, but the group maintained an uplifting atmosphere. The team really helped me cope with the outcome of the situation.

I was responsible for making the board class in the game, alongside any methods that would be considered useful to the board. A decision was made to represent the board as a list of lists, as I believed this was the easiest implementation for everyone to work with. Additionally, methods such as returning the value of a single tile on the board, as well as finding all valid moves on the board, were some examples of code that was worked on for the board class. 

The group was doing great, everyone had their code to work on, everyone was being helpful to each other, and the vibe was very encouraging and positive. This was until we got introduced to the project repository. Unfortunately, only one member in our group had previous experience working with GitHub, and it was obvious to see by our messy repository with over 150 commits. There was constant stress about who's committing what, what variable names should be used, and how we should link the code together so that it would work. The structure of our repository came to a point where communicating online was not sufficient enough. Weekly meetings had to be held in person in order for the group to be successful.

As a result, our group was in constant communication with each other, whether it was online or in person, talking about project details or just for fun! It was definitely stressful at times, but I could not have asked for a better group to work with. We all had our strengths and weaknesses, and we all had our differing levels of introversion and extroversion. Even with all our differences, the group came together to create a video game that was remarkable.

In the end, I am super satisfied with the course. I traveled roads that I was too afraid to travel in the past, and I had wonderful support from my group members to push me down this path. Although the course is coming to an end, I gained 4 new friends, and I couldn't be more content with my group. Special shout-out to team Zeros_Matter, you guys rock!