I go with rubrics for mine, where the 50% box is more or less "well, you made an effort toward the thing I asked for, but this below minimal standard" and anything below that gets a zero.
Then I have boxes for "you did the bare minimum I asked for", "you did everything I asked for", and "wow, I'm impressed!"
Sounds reasonable. For upper level classes, rubrics helped. But for intro, I never found a system that I was happy with. Maybe the answer was to just accept a bimodal distribution of grades...
That seems reasonable in an intro, where you likely have a number of students who don't intend to take it all the way, once they find out what it really entails.
the one thing I do miss from grading: once I got an answer that looked like it couldn't be right, but I tested it anyway. And it worked. So I tested it more. And it kept working. So I really dug into it & learned something new. I was up late finishing everything else that go put aside while I was researching that one answer. It was worth it.
I've come to believe that intro in many ways is a broken idea.
It was a very elegant recursive solution to something mathy... Let me see if I can find it..
Yeah, it was the "n choose k" problem. Instead of focusing on the clue for expanding the formula for n!, she used Pascal's triangle which I hadn't encountered before.
But the code didn't mention the triangle by name - I had to reverse engineer that part.
Maybe my google-fu was lacking, but it took me a while to put it all together.
Also, I wasted some time just coding up a new tester to more aggressively test the code.
I was delighted to find that my 'accepted' solution broke before hers.
And once it fell into place... it was great. Like finally getting "proof by induction" all over again. Both are great moments in time for me.
@DMGregory Do you have a publicly accessible syllabus for your advanced game mechanics class?
Generalized curiosity. Happened to have Schell's "art of Game Design" out today & was looking through some of the related books recommended by Amazon. There was some text that had "advanced game mechanics" in the title, but there was no table of contents available. So I guess in part, I'm wondering what makes the cut for advanced.
Good question! It's the title that the college gave the class, so O had to figure that out for myself a bit. ;)
In this case, it's a follow-up to the Fundamentals of Game Mechanics class, where we looked fairly reductively at the building blocks of mechanics: states, actions, feedback, visual/audio/other cues...
So where I chose to take the "advanced" class was in applying those principles at a higher level, designing not just a mechanic, but systems of mechanics, to achieve particular goals.
So we talked about design direction, about designing for emergence, and about designing to motivate particular player types.
Sounds reasonable. In my experience, some classes also lean one way or another based on the instructor's interests.
Presently, I'm trying to feel my way through a "discovery versus planning" design choice. I suspect I'm doing it wrong - the right answer is to do just something (anything) and iterate. Hard to escape my own head though.
Anyway, that maybe that would be in the advanced side of things since it's balancing one mechanic against another based on player type?
@DMGregory Thanks for the offer. I'll probably take you up on it after I've made myself prototype something. Right now, I'm letting myself try to get by designing & critiquing an imagined system, rather than an actual thing. I need to actually make a data point to navigate off of something real.
@TheMattbat999 One upside to that is that you don't have to wait as long as we did to connect to a community that shares your passion for game development.
Hey everyone ! Not sure if this is worth the opening of a question... lets say i bought a asset pack from unity store... it contains a fbx file of a tree, and a texture atlas... But i dont like the color of that tree and i want to modify it... when i modify the whole material, it also changes the color of the tree roots... i want to change the color of the leaves instead... how the hell should i do that ? :/ Any help for a graphical noob ?
So is there any program that allows me to load the fbx and texture atlas to change the color of certain vertices for creating a new and better looking tree color ?
Something that is easy to use and doesnt kill you with thousand of different options
Would be glad for any help :) cant find anything about this and i have zero experience with models, textures and similar stuff
@DMGregory Yes i did... but i dont know what parts belong to what tree... probably i need to adjust this a bit, the texture atlas contains the merged textures for multiple trees... so i would need to test a lot...
This is it basically... just out of curiosity... isnt there a simple tool where you can load the fbx, the texture atlas and modify it that way ?
The focus is on the simplicity and ease of such a program... atleast in my case... i bet blender is a great software for modeling... but its too complicated and too much if you just want to change the color of some vertices
