I’m still slowly chipping away at the isometric engine, and I’ve made a couple more changes to the Japan level after watching someone else play. I think I’m going to implement some sort of difficulty setting, which should make the game more fun for everyone, though it will take a lot of work to get it started.
I don’t have any new uploads yet, but I wanted to draw everyone’s attention to this video from Code.org, which is a nonprofit group dedicated to trying to bring programming classes to every school in America. I remember discussing with someone once how much differently programmers see the world- I remember distinctly watching my first hockey game, and in the back of my mind I was trying to design an AI behavior that would emulate what the players were doing. While fishing one day, I was looking at the surface of the water, and wondering how I’d go about implementing a 3D Ripple/particle engine in QBASIC.
After all the military uselessness I’ve endured, I feel like I owe it to myself to do something in life that I’ll actually enjoy, and I’ve been working towards becoming a math teacher. I love teaching, training, and explaining, and math fascinates me. In my high school, the programming teachers were always some other sort of teacher primarily, who also had a collateral job with programming, and so I never really thought that I could just BE a programming teacher. I’ve been toying with the idea- for a few months now- about trying to get some sort of basic computer science degree along with my math education degree and teacher licensing, so hopefully I can land myself in a similar position.
To teach programming- wouldn’t that be an amazing sort of experience?
Anyways, this video- it’s a really well-done little PSA-style thing with interviews from a lot of the computer giants- Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Gabe Newell, etc.
Also, check out some of those offices, man. How incredible would it be to work there?!
Hey man, been a couple of weeks. I want to see your latest Update stuff! I know you’ve been hitting the droid devo stuff lately, but I want to see what you’re working on.
Yeah, I know, I know. The android stuff was a good diversion, but I have started working on my stuff, and by the time you come back from this next underway, there’ll definitely be more to see. I revamped the layout for dialogue boxes, made it so the sake bottle thing at the top of the screen kind of bounces when you pick one up, and when you use one, and I got the screen for selecting a difficulty working. As of right now, the difficulty doesn’t actually do anything- that’s my current project. I’m pretty much going to have to go through all 8,474 lines of code to make sure I’ve caught everything that needs to be adjusted for difficulty, and add in the code to tweak it as necessary. Then, it’s going to require an immense amount of playtesting to make sure that the difficulty balances are set all right. It’s kind of intimidating, and something I’m not really looking forward to. But I’ll get there.