Creating Student-Athlete Dilemma has been a long, challenging, but meaningful journey. The idea first started on the PoeAI engine. I tried to build the game there, but after many attempts, I realized that managing and editing the game always required the paid version. For that reason, Omar and I, decided to transfer our game from Poe to Google Forms instead, as it gave us a more stable and sustainable platform.

At first, learning how Google Forms works took a lot of time and effort. But eventually, we were able to create two completely different paths in the first draft. These paths helped players experience the real pressure student-athletes face in balancing training, academics, and personal life.

After presenting the first version, our classmates gave us great feedback. They encouraged us focusing more on the outcomes of each choice and showing the consequences clearly, and recommended adding more depth to the choice outcomes and including a motivational quote at the end. Moreover, one important correction came from our professor, who told us to change the term “violent and non-violent sports” to “contact and non-contact sports.” Then we applied all suggestions for the final draft.

In addition, if I had more time, I would have explored more programs besides Google Forms because it could not calculate and compare multiple categories at the same time, such as GPA, health, and social status all together. However, I believe adding that feature would have made the experience more powerful for players. Throughout this process, I learned a lot. One of the biggest lessons was patience. Honestly, creating the game was not at once, I had to go through more than eight drafts to create this simple and clear version finally. I even tried coding it in C++, but it was too complicated and time-consuming to finish before the deadline. At the end, this project helped me grow not just as a creator, but also as a problem-solver. I hope everyone who plays Student-Athlete Dilemma gets a real feeling of the struggles student-athletes go through—and maybe even reflects on their own priorities and choices.

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Test your decision-making as a student-athlete-[play the game here].