Tuesday, March 20, 2018

Spring Break and Updates #1

Spring break is ahead of me from the tragic Winter Quarter that I have gone through...

My grades have hit a wall... either because I have been taking too many classes (5!) or because my brain has not been set on studying as much as it was when I took CS33.

I'm just going to write about a few things as I look at finishing up my final final (Math 61, Discrete Mathematics) tomorrow.

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1. SuperCoding
I have been working really hard as an instructor, teaching three programming / game development different classes every Sunday at SuperCoding (http://www.supercoding.io/) to teenagers and children. It's really fun, but I am still not used to teaching 6+ hours every week after a long and tough time with linux, discrete math, and impossibly hard syntax (linguistics).
I currently teach three courses - Practical Coding (HTML/CSS & C++), GameMaker Coding 1 (Game Design), and GameMaker Coding 2 (Harder Game Design), and creating three presentations throughout the week plus homework assignments and quizzes is quite the challenge. However, I manage to somehow get it done every week with the cost of my Saturday, or just Saturday night (all night, hehe).
Next quarter, I will be teaching Practical Coding 1 and 2 (2 is Python & JavaScript), GameMaker Coding 1 (again), and GameMaker Coding 3 (Next Step). I'm looking forward to it! Another interesting thing that I have noticed is that the location of the office / place itself is quite far from UCLA - around 20 miles. I do not have a car yet, so that makes travel a bit intense, especially when the traffic is not playing nicely. I will keep you all updated on how this goes. For now, I will be heading back to Taiwan for spring break and look forward to developing some games.

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2. Game Development
I realize that I do not have as much time as I thought, especially taking so many classes and working so many jobs/internships at the same time, for game development, so I will be dedicating my spring break working on presentations for the next quarter (for SuperCoding) and also using HTML/CSS/JavaScript to develop mini games. I got a textbook earlier this quarter that I have not really had the time to look at, but will be bringing it back to Taiwan and going hard!

I will also be going through a video tutorial of how to make a turn based RPG game using GameMaker Studio 2.0 and look forward to making my favorite type of a video game a reality. This will be top priority along with the textbook that I will read and analyze, so look forward to some game development news over the next week or two.

If I somehow have time outside of these two big goals, I will spend it playing games and working on Trials of Rice and learning how to use Unity. I already understand C# relatively well, compared to the past, and have had experience playing with Unity, so it seems like something that is doable! Spring break is the perfect time to get a jump start on these things, so I will be getting to it!

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Well I have plenty more things I want to talk about and work on, but I will leave those things for another time. In the mean time, hopefully my finals end well, haha...

Bonus End

$ touch goodbye.txt && vim goodbye.txt
i Goodbye and see you next time! :wq
$ cat goodbye.txt
Goodbye and see you next time!