It’s my last quarter at OSU, so before we get into the actual project work, I guess this first post will just be some light rambling on the state of things in my life.
I earned my first degree in Public Health at the UW, I think in the sort of zombified stupor a lot of teenagers turned young adults do when they’re burned out but don’t know what that means yet. Never were there dreams of being a doctor or a focused researcher, and as the years passed, I realized that I needed to start making choices for my future benefit (many thanks to Emily, then girlfriend, now wife). Following through with OSU’s post bacc program has been the up climb for me, collecting little victories along the way. If being an adult is signified by the accumulation of life’s little sorrows, I am beating them back with a keyboard and a buzzing brain. I still have a long way to go before I could call myself a competent developer, but chugging along with me in parallel are the little joys of learning how to develop video games (I have been enjoying the Godot game engine), a dog who is upset with how little I pay attention to him vs the screen, and friends who remain confident that I’ll get a job in our climate.
My fingers are crossed that I get selected for the 3d Escape Room Game project – I’m currently working on a 2d game in Godot that is sort of a blend of Vampire Survivor’s endless enemy wave genre (rogue-lite? perhaps) and tower defense strategy. I’ve just started working on it with a friend of mine, and it isn’t very good right now, but it has been a lot of fun learning how to use the engine. Eventually we’d like to pivot to 3d, so I figured just jumping straight into a project would be swell. The eagle eyed among you might also remember seeing a project for making a tower defense game in HTML5 – also a project I wouldn’t mind being a part of.
Games in hindsight have been sort of the crux of why I decided I’d like to pursue a degree in CS. Yes, I could teach myself, blah blah blah, but I knew without some sort of codified structure, I would fall flat. My favorite sort of games are the ones that tell you a story – that build you a world, give you a character to reflect and love or hate, something that requires you to dig around in to get the most out of. I, like many others, am very salty with how long Silksong is taking to be released (but of course I would rather it not be rushed). Anything can be a good story, if you’re invested in it. Even escaping a room! Here’s hoping I get the chance to trap you all in a room with physic based puzzles!
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