Death Ship

Remember that scene in that episode where the Captain demands for the crew to repeat the survey of the world over and over again? Sometimes Fullsail can feel like that. With classes going so fast and essentially being brutal as all hell on your synapses and when you finally feel the rush of finishing one, you have to get the ship ready to land on the damn planet all over again.

Eh. I complain but I enjoy this. Don't get me wrong, I do not want to keep this up (being a student) for much longer but I do ultimately feel a rush from all the hard work.

So yet again, classes are going to start tommorow (or I should say a few hours from now). The two new courses will be Rules of the Game (ROG) and Structure of Game Production (SGP). From what I've seen, ROG will be more of a design class that focuses on mechanics while SGP will be our first true experience developing a game with a team. SGP has me fairly nervous but I do take some solace in that fact that my class seems to be made of honest hardworkers. There are a few bad apples and I can only hope to avoid them. I do want to make sure to take some time and analyze everything I learned from the old project. I think the most important was focusing on a data driven design from the get-go and making it a bottom-line rule that any data that does not need to be hardcoded shouldn't be. While I was in Wisconsin with Laura, I took some time to take a few notes on my project and that was the biggest note. The extra work put in early on to keep a data driven game can pay off in spades. I think if my team will permit, I'll try to put in my little structure that reads arguments in a generic fashion. I used to read in various lines from a script without having to change how the object read the line.

I spent some time today working on the ol' Sucker Punch pre-interview problem. I keep this one circulating in the back of my mind and when I feel I've learned some new techniques I come back to it and try it again. After doing my research in Memory Management over break, I found some nice new ways to approach it by applying essentially the same technique as the memory pool. I haven't been able to get all the requirments (I am essentially 240 bytes short of the avg needed).

Well fortunatly tommorow is ROG so it'll be a nice way of getting back into classes. Also as a huge perk, classes are M-F 9-5 for the whole month. SGP is two months but I think it will maintain the same schedule even though ROG will be over after a month. Yeah! Back to normalcy!

Anyhoos...time to get to bed and then get up and land the ship...again.