Mastery Journal

Hello Tumblr,

It’s been awhile since I’ve been on here. I finally got a job as a Full-Stack Developer and had it for a while. I’m working as a web developer. Little bummed I’m not a video game developer just yet, the work here is a bit boring and not really challenging, but I guess I have to wait a bit more time before becoming one until some game studio takes the risk and hire me. Besides that, thanks to the light work I have in my job I have more time to do more extracurricular activities. While in that time I decided to do a number of prototypes using Vuforia and Unity. I created a few to understand how to create properly designed Augmented reality using Vuforia. I personally don’t have a mobile device that can run the ARCore and/or ARKit SDK to make scanning easier and more streamlined towards the user. At lease on the bright side, vanilla Vuforia is good to make simple augmented reality apps for most devices. The first one I’m going to show is a small project that displays a small portal on a scannable surface. 

As you can see in the video I scanned a surface which was my laptop keyboard to display portal to another room. I should have found a better detailed surface to reduce shaking/flickering of objects but I digress. As you move about it would look like you are looking through a portal to another world. You can’t see it in the video but the way I designed the game view if you get too close to the portal the camera won’t be able properly display the portal and disappear. Later on, I’m planning on doing a portal door that you can physically walk through and look around.

I believe I haven’t really learn much this month. There was some research and one sided conversations in numerous discussion posts. I felt I wasted a lot of my time navigating around dead links to complete assignments. It would have been better if there were other people in the class to talk to. Back to the discussion posts, the number of them made the entire class boring. The class should have been tailored if there aren’t many people in the class. 

Interesting time this month. I had to juggle work, moving between Florida to Arkansas, and work on Full Sail projects. I tried to use all the time I had to do all my work. I even had to stay in a hotel between Florida and Arkansas to turn in some work. I wouldn’t say I learn ALOT this month because most of it dealt with paperwork and other things leading up to actual development. I am still confused with finding a capstone advisor process. I am talking to a couple people to get my capstone approved but it has proven to be annoying. If I could say I learn anything is how I can monetize my mobile apps quite easily. I thought it would be harder. Just a couple lines of code and you have ads on your apps. I was able to implement it in android studio and I saw how its done in Unity and it was even easier. Just import a unity package a game object that loads an ads and call a function to show an ads at a good time to do it.

So this was an interest month. I learned a bit this month. I could have rationed my time better. I often found my starting my work on a Thursday and working really hard till Sunday. I did felt the Twine assignment f didn’t fit well in the over all course especially when I was told to view a video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nbX08mBDFMo. The point of the video was to tell people that mobile game don’t need a big narrative to enjoy because user would most likely play in 5-10 minute burst maybe even shorter. I did like the programming assignment that was given because I actually got something to program and I learn a bit on the android run time pipeline with touch events.

Hey Tumblr I have decided to move my reviews to a different blog dedicated for video game reviews here: 

Dreammotion Inc. (2017, April 20). Gun Strider.

Vlambeer (2013, March 14). Ridiculous Fishing. Vlambeer

Fireproof Games. (2012). The Room [Multi-platform game]. Guildford, UK: Fireproof Studios.

I am almost finished working on some my final work for this month’s class work called: Computer Science for Engineer. It was a pretty interesting class and help me get into Android development with android studio and a bit on IOS development. The assignments weren’t to hard thanks to my previous work I did during my time in Full Sail while pursuing my Bachelor’s Degree. Time Management was okay on my part. I made sure I started work early to get to any roadblocks I will probably get to earlier on so I can squash them early in the week. I learn a bit of android studio during the month. I has issue installing some form of source control software in my Mac and learn that android studio has built in Git functionality. I was able implemented a couple of AI algorithms I implemented in C++ and ported them in the Java language and have them run on my android phone which was cool to me because they were my first apps that weren’t just an app that just said “Hello World” but a bit more advance. I’ll probably used what I learn here to make a proper game loop because all I did up till now was wait for a valid touch event to hit to update the screen. I will most likely keep and use some of the implementations I made in this course and use them in other projects especially path finding algorithm which has also come in handy with my final project in the few final months when getting my Bachelor’s degree.

https://github.com/Tonykidv2/AStar_pather

Made a two more projects in Android both implementing some form of AI Algorithm. One using the Minimax algorithm and the other using the A* path search algorithm. I’m actually getting used to the IDE and Java in general. I’m getting used to Android SDK and there is a lot of documentation online and very supportive fanbase around it. I still have to figure out a bit more on the Java Language because it was a bit hard moving/copying memory and making sure I’m not messing around some other memory block. Other than that understanding and writing Java language wasn’t a problem for me. Next Time in Andriod Studio I’ll try to figure to make a proper game loop and make some animations on screen because up till now I haven’t done any animations and just quick changes based of user touch.

Here is the source code for both projects I made:

https://github.com/Tonykidv2/Tic_Tac_Toe

Here is a video I watch every now and then. This pastor talks about tackling life in steps. You should take each step in life one at a time and once you get comfortable take another step and take in new problems to overcome.

In this post I made a short slide show in Youtube where I written down goals that I will accomplish once I finish each specific class. I set up 3 goals for each class and a strategy on how to accomplish it. 

Here is a video of a game that my favorite developer, Hideo Kojima, is making, Death Stranding. Kojima likes to make eccentric video games since he started making them back in the late 80s. He doesn’t like making the same game like everyone else is but likes to go against the grain using filming techniques and epic storylines to make an interesting game. I would like to also make game that goes against the grain and make that other people try to emulate.