MY COMMON APP ESSAY


It’s pretty bad.

I wrote a pretty bad essay for my common app. Why not put it up on my
website for everyone to read…

Share an essay on any topic of your choice. It can be one you’ve already written, one that responds to a different prompt, or one of your own design.

Hada.cf

When I joined school this year, returning from a long vacation to
Andaman, I was pretty surprised to see what my classmates were up to.
Apparently, the Table-Tennis table in our school had gone missing over
the summer break, and the free time and boredem had led my friends to
start playing a “number guessing” game with their calculators. While
that might seem mundane to some, or even a borderline crazy thing for
highschoolers to do for hours everyday, it was actually pretty
exilirating.

That’s because overtime the game evolved, becoming “Connect four”,
“Bingo”, and everything on between, all while still keeping random
integers at its core. Finally it settled on a turn based strategy game
for four players. That’s when we decided to turn it into a videogame. I
was learning about the p5.js library online and I thought this was the
perfect time to put Mr. Shiffman’s teachings into some real use.

We had a group of four, and we decided to name ir after our initials.
(Han, Abhay Dhruva, Allen). I had already started creating prototypes,
and we began drawing mock-ups and UI diagrams. I told abhay to start
working on the graphics.

He was the class photographer, se he became the Graphic Designer for our
game. I was the Devoloper, and also the leader, or so I’d like to think.
I didnt really have much control over others. While I was working
upwards of 25 Hours a week, both Han and Allen barely worked at all.
Abhay on the other hand, while hardworking, often went in completly
different directions. Sometimes he would send me sprites that were
larger than the whole game itself, or try to create “loading screens”
that actually just displayed animations for a fixed amount of time. I
had a hard time giving him directives, and a lot of it was because I
didnt feel I should have the authority. This was mostly because the code
i wrote was pretty bad. It was inefficient, there was a lof of
duplication of effort and it just had bad coding practices in general.

But then i realised the most important fact of working in a group; The
people that i’m working with are just people. That can come to their own
resolutions. And thats what happened.

Abhay realised what he was doing wrong and quickly fixed it. His
cooperation increased too. Han became my testing department and helped
out with the readme page. Allen started working on the Sound Effects.
And even i sped up devolopment working more than 30 Hours a week. Infact
our group was working about 70 hour per week in total. And one might say
the final product wasnt really that great of a game. But it was a gem in
our eyes.

The time we spend on the game was the most productive time of the year.
Not only did we learn thousands of things in the process, but we
realised life is really about finding what we are passionate about and
doing it with all our heart.

Copyright © 2018 Dhruva Lokegaonkar

This work is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0
International License.