It's a blog.
Archive for April, 2010
Summer Week
Apr 25th
My first semester back at Seneca@York is now over, leaving me with a little over two weeks of free time before I dive head-first into the second semester. I’m going to be doing another three semesters in-a-row before I allow myself a summer semester. Will this be difficult? Yes. Am I insane for attempting to do this? …Yes. However, years of shopping around for a post-secondary program that I actually wanted to be in has left me yearning to finish school and get on with life (For some reason, I have a feeling I will wish the opposite in 20 years).
I have been trying to get an officially sanctioned ‘Game Design & Development’ club started at school but it has been difficult to find a teacher willing to mentor & help out, which depresses me greatly. After all, University of Toronto has one, so does Waterloo. I have e-mailed two Seneca professors involved in game development courses if they would help: one said she was too busy with her own research project (which is understandable) and the second one never bothered to respond. I will be very disappointed if no instructors step up and lend a hand with this, and I’ll be forced to start an unofficial club. Officially or unofficially, it will happen.
I am going to Cuba for a week with my girlfriend this Saturday, and by the time I get back, my second semester will be a day away from beginning. Because of that, I hope to finish learning the basics of Python this week, as well as setting up the website for the unofficial S@Y Game Dev/Design club. Aside from that, it will be a lazy week. I will probably make another post or two before I leave about Python & the Unofficial Game Dev. club. Cool stories, Hansel? I thought so too!
Failed.
Apr 8th
Now that I am entering the final stretch of my first semester in Computer Programming & Analysis, it would seem that I actually have the time to make a blog post! Things have been quite busy but all I have left to do now is to finish coding my Sudoku puzzle generator (in C) and study for my final exams, school-wise. The middle part of this semester, as one could probably tell from the lack of posts, has kept me quite busy, and I’m adjusting to a quite different style of work than I am used to. No more long-winded essays! Oh, it feels quite good. What feels even better is that I really seem to enjoy programming. Granted, I have only been scratching the surface of C, as well as have dabbled my feet in a little bit of Python, but so far I seem to be grasping it all quite quickly.
I’m actually going to be taking my second semester during the summer, so besides crossing my fingers that my school has a proper A/C system, I also plan to work on two little projects. The first one is to re-design this blog & to complete the splash page located on the root of the domain. It will definitely not be as flashy or good-looking as the current design, but at least it will be one I created myself. I am taking a class where I will be learning HTML, CSS and JavaScript so it’s pretty much like getting two birds stoned at once.
The second project is to code a simple game in C, using the SDL library. Right now, I am just thinking something like Tetris or Blockbreaker, just to learn the basics. After I get that done, I would like to add an interesting gameplay element to the game that makes it different from vanilla Blockbreaker/Tetris. I’ve been doing some brainstorming, as well as reading the documentation for SDL, so hopefully I can get started on that once my exams are complete.
So that is my plan. If you were wondering, the post title refers to the fact that it has been exactly two months since my last post, and how the first line of said post has me promising the opposite will happen… oops! Well, I never stop trying so I will continue to attempt to blog about possibly-interesting things. Until then…
