The Back Country

So me and Charlie are way bored with walking behind the apartments and being confined with the narrow uhhhh confines of the dog park. So, I happened to read about this place called the Big Little Econ State Forest that's about 20 minutes away, not a long ways by time but it feels a whole world away - which is fantastic. The preserve gets its name due to the fact that the Little Econlockhatchee river and the Big Econlockhatchee river meet here. The park has several thousands of square miles that have been roped off to preserve this unique environment, being new to Florida I thought it was totally awesome. Very dense primary and secondary jungle growth here with spooky moss covered creek inlets in places and the river itself is an eerily dark and deep river. However I don't think the locals think twice about swimming it, nobody seems to care much about gators around here. They say most gators are too small to be threat - but there is always that chance a big one might be lurking just beneath the surface. Oh and another nice thing about the park, there are actually features to the landscape, its not just a flat plot of land. It would be great to mountain bike if it weren't for the very narrow trails and the unfathomable mass of spider webs you would collect on your face. Yes there are tons of them I took a lot of them out using my face just by hiking through the place. I went about 3 miles (round trip) took about two hours there and back again. Oh and two of us went in, but 8 of us came out. Me Charlie and 6 ticks - I hate ticks - nasty little bugs.

Tammy is visiting her brother in Key West so that's why its just me and Charlie on this little adventure. She also has the camera I think so I took these pictures on my phone.

Programming 1 - programming test [warning: this blog contains mild programming language]

So I took the "programming" programming test on Saturday, so far all the quizzes have been written, but with this tests you are given a task to build a program from scratch. The goal is to create the game Connect Four, all on the text based console. But one catch is that the teacher has already written the "calling" program aka "main" so you have to write the program to fit the way he is calling it in his program. It was challenging to do, took me about 2 hours to finish the core of the program then I messed around with the extra credit which was very challenging. I did figure it out - some in class and the rest when I was driving home from the test. It's pretty well documented that most ideas come to you when your relaxed and a test environment is not very relaxing.

Over all I think I did well, I cant say the same for a lot of the other students who are brand new to programming, you could tell they were really sweating. There are so many little things that aren't necessarily related to the code we've been learning that can help you succeed in the class and on the test. If you know how to think in code and have some experience debugging code and working within the visual studio things will get a lot easier.

For instance one student who is brand new to coding was having major problems because he couldn't figure how to debug his code during the test. This was due to the fact that the teachers code was already written, he couldn't just run the debugger because there were all kinds of functions that the teachers code was calling that he [the student] had not created. Thus this alone would create all kinds of errors. I got around this just by commenting the teachers code out. Creating my behind the scenes code then un-commenting the corresponding piece a line at a time. Just knowing this allowed me to create the program with a lot less stress. Also I could have created a mock environment to test my code before putting into the real program, which is another technique that's very handy for testing code. These an many other tricks are things you learn just playing with programming, thinking of something you would like to building then building it. It just can't be taught in class room environment.

[Future students]
So if you want to go through the game developing course at Full Sail and are new to programming I would pick up a C++ for dummies book, read it, and WRITE CODE. It's not going to help you to just buy it and it wont help much if you just read it you gotta get your hands dirty. In fact you might as well buy the book we are using in class which is: C++ Primer Plus - fifth edition by Stephen Prata. Its a good book, easy to read (for a programming book) and pretty extensive in the topics covered. Also my favorite programming book is Thinking in C++ by Bruce Eckel [BTW the e-version is free - http://www.mindview.net/Books/DownloadSites/]. It's wonderfull book that really does what it says it gets you thinking in C++. It teaches more than just code it teaches how to write safe code, it teaches a lot of little caveats that most books don't mention because they are a bit esoteric. Or so it seems till you run into a wall where knowing some of this behind the scenes info can get you unstuck or put you on the track to get unstuck.

[BEWARE]
If you go to Full Sail and you fail the Programming 1 or the Calculus Trig twice they will pull you out of the program and you either have to switch degrees or go home :(.

This fate is easy to avoid by taking the time and prepping for the math and programming. If you are passionate about this career than it should be no problem to find the motivation to do this. If you do have a problem finding motivation to program or to learn some math then maybe you should look at the newly launched Game Art bachelors degree program, still dealing with games just not all the code. But the nice thing about coding is that it pays better, so if you love to code and you love math then make it your job and be ready before you get here.

Math Man Goes Surfing

So a few things going on. Went body boarding, got my first check, setup a bank account here, got a replacement hard drive for my HP, and saw a HUGE alligator!!!

Yeah so we went to the beach again stayed there pretty much all day, went swimming and boogie boarding on our new boogie boards (only the best from Target). It was awesome, it was about 80 degrees (just pristine weather on coaco beach) the waves were huge. Coaco Beach is an awesome place, I think if I ever lived there I would pretty much lose all touch with reality and the rest of the world cause nothing matters when your hanging out on the beach down there, its awesome!

Also on the way down to the beach we saw a HUGE alligator just meandering along in the grass next to the highway, this was a big sucker at least 6 feet long and fat, big head, fat body, I was amazed. Its weird though when you tell the locals you saw a huge alligator they just kinda look at you and say "uh huh, you see them around" like its no big deal. I don't think a giant pre-historic reptile that fears nothing, would eat you without a second thought, and is scooting down the road like he owns the place is anything to be blas'e about but thats just me I guess.

So in other news, we got our first checks in (yeah! its nice) and I setup and account at Wachovia today, also my laptop starting coming up with a SMART error, which means [geek alert] that the bad blocks limit has been exceeded and an eminant failure is soon to come. I called HP and it was no sweat getting a hard drive sent out (SMART errors are easy to diagnose). Now as soon as this post is posted I'm going to pop in and restore from backup (FUN!).

Note to Future Students:
Back up your hard drives! If you loose a program that you've been writing for a week and its due tomorrow your are SCREWED! There just isn't time in this school for major delays, you will end up failing the class which is very easy to do at Full Sail. Things are so fast paced and they have such high standards its very easy to crash and burn on a class, it happens al lthe time in fact its normal here. Half the tests I have taken I wasn't really ready for, I didnt even realize there was going to be a test. Most people are caught of guard by the speed of things around here, so lost data is the last thing you need. What can you do to fix this? Easy, just get and external USB drive at least 200GB and back up to it (a full system backup) using the built in windows backup [Start -> Programs -> Accessories -> System Tools -> Backup] If your in game dev and you have an HP laptop, then be sure to create the DVD backup (it asks you to do this automatically). This will let you put your OS back on the system, then you can restore your most recent settings using the full system backup on the USB drive.

Month 2

So another month is underway, this month its Calc-Trig and Programming 1. I have a transfer credit for calc and trig so I've been auditing the class helping others with the homework assignments (which are liberal).

A word about the calc and trig class:
This class is insane, a lot of the students had some algebra several years ago in high school, did some review to pass the entrance exam, and now in the course of one day in calc trig class are expected to differentiate using the power rule, product rule, and quotient rule. Now they are able to do it, it isn't pretty but they get it done. I had 16 weeks of trig and 16 weeks of pre-cal before I ever touched calc-1 and even then it wasn't till about 6 weeks into the course that we covered the product rule and quotient rule. Lets just say I'm really glad I took my time with the math, I have a feeling will continue to serve me far beyond this school.

[So to anyone reading this blog that is thinking about going to Full Sail, I would recommend at least doing some self study over trig and calculus 1 material, this will help you a lot.]

Programming 1:
This class is much more laid back than calc, its difficult for the people who have never had programming before but its not so rushed that you miss all the details of programming. So far the topics have been review for me with nuggets of new insight dispersed throughout the lectures. So it's been pretty good overall, I'm learning some new things while reviewing a lot of old things.

This month the schedule is Tue, Thur, Sat 5PM to 1AM and Wed, Friday 9AM to 5PM.

It's time to hit the surf, will post again later!

1st month

So I've almost completed the first month, only have two classes left in each course. So what I have learned? Well, I've learned a lot about creating games. At least all the preplanning stuff before you even start to code anything. It has been insightful and its been fun.

There has been a lot of work that goes into group efforts, kinda like at Dell when I would have to corral people and coordinate efforts to get parts replaced or a bunch of servers repaired. Now I have to coordinate with a lot of people to get a robot costume built, sound effects worked out, Power Point content consistent.

In my ever so serious career at Full Sail the most note worthy things I have done so far are dress up as robot - with my own custom made sound effects, and create a very crude 2D animation of an owl biting the head off a rat to demonstrate the kind of sound effects our game could potentially have.

I'm still waiting on video of the robot, its the craziest thing you've ever seen

I do have the rat snack though so without further delay...

Make sure you have your sound turned up, so you can hear the totally awesome CRUNCH!

Went to the beach again yesterday, saw some big waves. There was several people out there surfing and wakeboading.

Its all game stories and BS

And by BS I mean Behavioral Science.

So I'm actually half way through my first two classes at Full Sail. So far English Comp/Game Doc is the best class. BS is a little odd, some things are helpful, some things are unexpected from a psychology class.

So the game doc class is way cool. The idea in this is class is to create the all the story, character, and level content that will go into a hypothetical game. On day one you start by creating some basic elements. They give you the game genre (My team got "action adventure") then you get three very random objects, we got a key chain with a bird head (it was just a toy not a real bird head), a pink plastic barbie purse, and a tiny plastic cylinder with a magnifying lens at one end. From these three objects you must abstract you game idea, and it has to be done in about an hour and half - it sounds insane but it was really fun. We were all skeptical that we could come up with a game that was interesting but its evolved into something that's really cool. It has personified animals in the game and somehow it's ended up having a story line and characters similar to star wars. It been fun fleshing out the characters and then seeing what other people develop and how they tie it to the main story. We've been learning about how to present the documentation in a way that's useful for the artists, marketers, executives and so on. This way everyone making the game can gleam the things they need from the document.

Its been fun learning how developers created story in some of my favorite games like half life, splinter cell, Max Payne, even Mario. The teacher discusses all the techniques that have been developed and what works and what doesn't. The major problems the industry has trouble with, like developing characters that are 3D or round, most all games characters are 2D or flat. Most characters don't arc, like in a movie or book, they don't really go through hardship and trial then learn from that. If the do its very hard to relay this to the player. There is no way to learn their personality as intimately as in a book. These are all challenges that no one was figured out how to effectively overcome and our instructor challenges us with finding a better way. You really get the sense that telling stories in video games is a craft still in its infancy, and in fact it is, its exciting though there is a lot of room out there to progress the art.

To future students: This class is being broken into two parts now, English Comp traditional style and Game Documentation. This will allow a more in depth approach to designing the game story, characters, levels and so forth. This will be a good thing.

Behavioral Science, while not my favorite, has its benefits. I've learned some interesting things about stress at Full Sail and how to handle it which has been helpful. The class so far is really easy, you get a book but its never required to read it, instead of reading the book we just use Power Point slides from class and all tests are based on them. Mostly this class seems to focusing on having you interact with people and get to know them, the big assignment is to work with your assigned group to come with a presentation, basically a skit, to demonstrate one of the concepts from class. This is a bit weird, I wasn't too excited about doing it but it does force people to work with others from different degree programs so you end up getting some good contacts in other degrees.

Culture shock - So getting up every day and designing stories for fairy tale kingdoms, skits for psychology, playing games for research, going to club meetings on modding the latest RPG game, and hanging out with people who's idea of a full day is 8 hours of World Of Warcraft is to say the least a major, major, MAJOR change. It's been strangely difficult to get in sync with this, I keep finding myself distancing myself so that I can clear my head and be ready to work. But this is the work! Crazy. It seems to be successful here you have to be really creative, really social, and work really hard and maybe not even that creative just social and work hard. It's definitely not the typical school, for better or worse, and when I start to take myself to seriously I have to remember that "hey, I'm making video games" its ok if I have to help design a skit for psychology class, or whatever.

So that's the summary for the past 2 weeks