Week 2

After reading that last blog post I think I should consider proofreading before posting.  There's like 5 typos and I barely wrote two paragraphs.  Ah well, this isn't an English program.  ;)  Anyways, the bulk of my time spent this week was on prototyping our game.  It is coming along and I am becoming more familiar with Moai.  It's an odd framework though, I find its generally easier to do incredibly complicated things like set up 2D physics in Moai, but the simple things like drawing an invisible shape on the screen to use as a hit box is nigh impossible.  Also, the documentation is absolutely miserable so learning anything new is a bit of a crapshoot.  Regardless, progress is being made and the game should be playable in time.

My engineering class is still moving at a crawl.  We spent another 90 minutes just on SVN this week.  I'm pretty sure when I was introduced to version control for the first time we spent significantly less time.  The teacher seems to focus on the small stuff that we should be looking up on our own, because after SVN we spent maybe 20 minutes on preprocessor stuff (the only C++ we've discussed so far) and then for whatever reason we spent the rest of the time reviewing the IEEE standards for encoding primitive data types.  I'm still expecting this class to get difficult in a hurry, but with next Monday off for Labor day, we're going to be a quarter of the way through the semester before it has a chance to ramp up.  I'm guessing within the month my blog posts will turn to rants about how hard that class has gotten, but until then you get to hear me rant about how slow it is.

Finally, I'm still kind of in awe about the fact that Game Design 1 is pretty much us just discussing video games on myriad of levels and yet I'm getting graduate credit for it.  I've always been a big advocate of games as art (though I've given up on caring about whether the rest of society agrees), but I guess a part of society has rubbed off on me and I feel like I'm cheating the academic system.  Which is awesome.

Welp, this post unintentionally ended up exactly like last time.  Maybe next week I'll have an interesting catastrophe to talk about so that whoever is reading this actually wants to rather than has too.  No guarantees though, still not an English major.

EAE Start!

So after spending an entire week in grad school for game development I think I can safely say we have hit the ground running.  Game Project 1 requires us to rapidly prototype a game every four weeks using a different set of developer tools each time.  This week it's a framework called Moai that I'm pretty sure was chosen only because Tim Schafer endorses it.  Ironically, every single thing I have read about Moai suggests you only use their software if you are not a beginner to game development and if you have time to get over its steep learning.  Naturally, we are all beginners and have less than four weeks to learn and prototype a game, but whatever, this is how CS has always been.  Sink or swim, if we put in the hours we should have something reasonable come week four.

The other two classes seem a bit more manageable.  While I have no doubt Game Engineering 1 is about to get real, it is starting off quite slow, which is much appreciated.  The third class should be a lot of fun, seems like a lot of game design theory and stuff like that.

On another note, this is the first time, aside from on the internet, that I've been completely surrounded by people that know as much about video games as I do... if not more.  It should be a fun couple of years.