Life Update

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 Back to business

So it's been quite a while since the last blog post which I fully intended to keep doing weekly as my IOS class progressed, but it started to become difficult to manage mentoring, school, blogging, side projects, and general house chores so I quietly swept this under the rug until I was ready to pull it back out. The reason I am able to blog again is because I finally finished school and completed my Masters degree (queue Master of Puppets). I feel a great pressure has been removed from my shoulders and my life can begin for the first time again for the fourth time (the first first time being when I finished high school, the second first time being when I finished my undergrad, and the third first time being when I left my internship). I enjoyed the weekend celebrating and now that it's over I am ready to get back to it. There's still 1 tiny bit of stress I'm waiting on and that's for the very last class to submit the grades which will determine if I truly did graduate with at least a 3.9 GPA which I worked extremely hard to achieve for the sake of having them say "with distinction" on my name card at graduation. I think it will be on my diploma too. The 3D geometry class (linear algebra for games) was the class that ruined my 4.0 but I was happy to even pass that class. This last class was doing service based applications using the Spring framework for Java which included database, service layer api, html, authentication, authorization, and security which being Java was not my favorite. I just want it to be an A- and then I will be happy.

Looking Forward

Putting that all aside I'd like to address what the future of my blog and my life really means now. I am planning to blog regularly, ideally about what I'm learning or creating for YouTube so that won't be going away. I did finish school but now I need to self learn. I've got this massive book for game AI called AI for Games Third Edition by Ian Millington that will probably take me 9 months to get through between reading and actually doing demos reflecting the content of the chapters. AI has always been a serious lack of knowledge for me having only written rudimentary algorithms to get it to look smart for the projects at work but after reading the first chapter of this book I've learned that those algorithms are indeed valid AI so perhaps I know more than I think I do. Nevertheless, I hope to become as deeply knowledgeable about the topic as the book will allow me to become and talk about that here.

I'm also thinking about what I want to tackle after I'm done with the AI book and maybe I should look at game physics or component architecture since both of those topics are common and I'm not exactly sure how to implement either of those myself. The game physics I would only want to learn the basic stuff like gravity, mass, acceleration, and I'm not sure what else is included in the basics or even if it is "basic" but I will find out. I think it's important to learn some of both of those topics since I don't always want to assume that I'll be working in an environment where both of those features are already done. Our current work environment doesn't use component architecture, so maybe if I knew how to do that it would improve our process, but at the same time it might not.

As for YouTube I've got a grid project that I recorded a video for explaining it but I don't like the recording so I want to go back and rerecord that. I also want to spend some time on the project as well and reevaluate the design since I actually included that project in my groups project for the capstone class and fleshed its capabilities out significantly to address the needs of the project.

I also have this urge to do a video on reading in a texture file to produce a 2D map that can be navigated after having binge played Final Fantasy I - V (I'm on the final boss of V but he's a pain so I need to grind a bit to level up for him) so I'll be doing something on that in the future.

I'm still mentoring and I'm unsure if I'll ever get around to really diving into Unreal, however I've really modified my mentoring style to talk about really anything that I know or the projects that I'm working on or even do design analysis / reverse engineering since those are real things that the mentees can expect to do at some point so it'll help to get them practicing on identifying the underlying functions of a game that they know nothing about how it was implemented.

Lastly, after that final grade is submitted I can get my completed transcript and apply to my alma matter (Columbia College Chicago) about becoming a part time teacher there since I wanted to do that before the pandemic but I guess you need a Masters to teach which makes sense. I just assumed at that time that 4 years of real world experience equaled a Masters degree but after having gone through the program I can say that it does not.

Until next time...

By the way....

I found this great gem of a website called milk.com that I highly recommend checking out if you like weird websites. It's owned by this big name software engineer who I can't remember his name but I'm also too lazy at this time of day to go and look up and he's got quite the credentials. He's made the site his weird blog/tool demo website/resume/randomness and it absolutely amazed me. I can only wish I'll be so lucky in life to achieve the level of success that comes with owning the domain milk.com

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