I made this game as part of one of my certificates (basically minor) for my college degree. In order to receive class credit I had to write a reflection essay on the project. I think it serves as a good postmortem, so I am posting as a dev log. 

----- Connecting Experience Reflection -----

Reacting to the Past: Russian Literature in 1877

My connecting experience was very ambitious in the number of disciplines it drew from. Though my background is in historical research, this project required me to use digital art, level design, UI/UX design, C# programming, sound design, video editing, web design, and education – in addition to historical research in 19^thcentury Russian social, political, and literary history. It was a real mind-bender of a project! Because of how many roadblocks I hit and how many different ways I had to think to solve them, I had to be really flexible in my way of thinking or I would have gotten completely stuck. I tried to be very realistic with myself. I know I am an amateur at all of these disciplines, so I didn’t allow myself to get discouraged if I didn’t know how to do something right away. Of course I didn’t! That was the point of doing the project. Getting stumped when solving a problem in one discipline just meant that I had to think about it in terms of another, and another, and another until I found a solution. It was never the “right” solution or the pretty or the neat solution, but I always found a solution.

I had to use Adobe Photoshop and InDesign to make the art assets for the characters and UI of the game. If I had just focused on the digital art discipline, I would have been able to make the game and its accompanying website more visually appealing, but I knew the visual elements had to be, above all, functional. I constantly kept UX and level design in mind. I let questions like “How will new players know what to click on?”, “Is it obvious how to get out of this menu?”, and “Players will spend most of their time reading the textbox, so how can I make that easy on their eyes and neck?” guide my design process.

Obviously, the bulk of the game used game development disciplines like level design and C# coding, but I had to keep in mind the educational goal of the game. Most games are designed for players to have fun. Talking to people usually isn’t considered a fun gameplay mechanic unless the story is woven into captivating combat or puzzles. But, since my game was designed to teach players useful information about Russian history that they would need in class, mine had to be dialogue-driven. I designed my levels to be very simple and to put the focus on the engaging and information-rich dialogue. The pleasant, non-distracting sound design reflects this goal.

The code keeps this goal in mind as well, but its simplicity also reflects the fact that it is by far my weakest discipline. Almost every line of code I wrote for this project I wrote with the help of online tutorials that I followed in the last three months. (Brackey’s on YouTube is a real saint). The work I had done using the Unity interface, as well as working with C# and Python code, in classes like Intro to Python, Intro to Game Design, and Level Design gave me a good foundation to teach myself new things. I learned the basics of how to code before starting this project, so I had a pretty good sense of what I did and did not know. Being able to articulate what I was trying to achieve with my code and the holes in my knowledge was an essential skill for learning how to program my game. The process was so different from classroom learning because I defined all my own learning objectives and made my own plans to achieve them, often in ways that seemed like hacks. It almost felt like cheating, but it wasn’t. 

That was especially weird (and liberating) to me coming from a history background because my entire field of study is made on tradition. There is one way we have always done things. We read books, and go to archives, and learn languages, and write papers, and we will continue to do it that way until the end of time because that is how things are done. If you have an idea of how to improve the field but you don’t have decades of tenure, sorry, that’s just not the way it works around here. That mentality has always drove me crazy because my generation grew up with digital technology and the field I want to work in often seems terrified by Microsoft Word. Thankfully, the attitude of many historians is changing, but if I had not been lucky enough to take so many AET, CS, and RTF classes and complete this connecting experience, I may have been unable to get past the idea that the only real historical work happens in an archive. 

In the field of game design, which embraced innovation and creativity in a way I am continually awed by, YouTube tutorials and forums seem to be how everyone learns. No idea is too innovative or too against tradition because the goal of new games seems to always be breaking expectations and trying something new. That’s why there are so many tutorials out there and why so many complete newbies like me participate in Game Jams – the field of game development is largely made of self-taught independent developers. Even the AET major at UT, where I took all my game development classes, is only six or seven years old. In this project, coding was my biggest challenge, but thanks to the help of the internet, it was also my biggest area of growth. I used to be really hesitant to say I knew two programming languages just because I’d taken a class or two on C# and Python, but I worked very diligently this semester to grow in those languages, so now I am very proud of my imperfect coding knowledge.

Spending time in the mindset of game development makes me more excited than ever to keep trying to change my own field for the better. There is a small community of digital historians at UT. People like Adam Clulow and Erika Bsumek are trying to use digital technology to help improve historical research as well as make history more public facing. Dr. Clulow is my thesis advisor, and he has worked on several history video game projects. He is the only person I have met to have done so. My favorite of his digital history projects, Virtual Angkor, is a simulation that teaches students about ancient Angkor Wat during its heyday. I intern for Dr. Bsumek for her digital history tool, ClioVis, that helps students visualize history and make connection through the creation of digital timelines. My connecting experience project, though it drew on so many disciplines, is a lot like these digital history projects in its goals. Like Virtual Angkor, it aims to use a simulation to immerse students in history. Like ClioVis, it seeks to make learning an interactive process that can reach anyone with WIFI.  

Through this project, I learned that Digital Arts and Media can be a force for good, not just for entertainment. The reason I chose to complete this Digital Arts and Media certificate was always because I strongly believe video games, simulations, and interactive media can be effective learning tools for history students. With the completion of this project, I can prove it. I am beyond lucky to have made my game for a real college class. It will be used next semester in Dr. Mayhew’s Reacting to Revolutionary Ideas course to help students learn and role-play Russian history. I have the opportunity to be an undergraduate assistant for the class, so I will be able to evaluate how helpful the game is and continue improving it. 

I am not the first person to think to use video games to teach, and I thankfully won’t be the last. However, there are still far too few of us. Because of how many disciplines are involved, this task is incredibly intimidating for almost everyone who is interested in it. Dr. Clulow is one of very few historians who has already worked on such game projects, and even he can’t do it all. I did absolutely everything necessary to develop this game, which means I drew from many, many disciplines and couldn’t do any one of them perfectly. I hope in the future I will be able to work on educational history games in a more specialized role with a team of people from diverse disciplinary backgrounds. If I have learned anything from this experience, it is that I can draw from any discipline I need to in order to realize my projects, but the project would be a million times better if I had a team of people from different disciplines to collaborate with. 

That is what I want to do for my career. For a long time, I have wanted to get a PhD in history and become a researcher and a professor, but working on this project and my thesis this semester has made me question that goal. I love tinkering. I love trying new things and working on interesting and innovative projects. But I also really, really love history. I believe studying history, and understanding that humans throughout time have always been just like us moderns, is a vital part of becoming a good person. Studying history makes accepting, compassionate, empathetic people who see a shared humanity in everyone around them. That being said, I don’t know if I want to spend my life reading books and writing papers. I want to do something that makes a real impact on the way others think and act, and I also want to work with people that can change the way I think. History is lonely work. I don’t think I can spend my life alone between the pages of a book.