Fives Times Better Binary Chop

I just accepted my new life pas­sion to be a mas­ter pro­gram­mer. Sud­denly… I feel… full of knowl­edge! Wait, I mean, full of MOTIVATION! That’s the one. Here I am, full of want-to-be-master-programmer, but there’s still this gap between me and that goal. I know how to pro­gram. I know all the fun­da­men­tal com­puter sci­ence the­o­ries, algo­rithms, and data struc­tures. I can object-orient any­thing, even your face. I even love cod­ing in C++! The next step, I sup­pose is to get more expe­ri­ence. So I did Code Kata #2. That’s the one where you recre­ate a binary chop algo­rithm 5 times. Sim­ple right? Here are my attempts:

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A Data-centric History of U.S. Coins

eBay Data Viz screen cap

A Data-centric His­tory of U.S. Coins

(Requires a WebGL enabled browser like Chrome)

I’d like to show off my data visu­al­iza­tion project I worked on through an eBay spon­sored class at UCSC. The class was focused on user expe­ri­ence and the web, so we exper­i­mented with three.js (WebGL), jQuery, and eBay javascript API. I chose to dis­play US coin data from used coin sales on eBay.
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We’re Screwed!!

Ballon-dragon-concept

Gad­zook! Robots! We’re Screwed!!

Plat­form: Ouya, Android, Mac, PC, Linux

Engine: LibGdx (Java)

I’m happy to finally post about my lat­est game, We’re Screwed!!. For seven months, as my senior project at UCSC, I con­ceived, pitched, recruited, pro­to­typed, designed, lead, and coded this 2D puz­zle plat­former tar­get­ing the Ouya plat­form. Whew! Yes I worked very hard on the game. It was a crazy adven­ture watch­ing my idea progress from a few words scrib­bled in a note­book to a full on dig­i­tal game. You can down­load and read more about the game on the web­site. I’ve had ample time to think about my expe­ri­ence; rather than describe the whole devel­op­ment story here, I’m going to post some of the things I learned dur­ing the process.
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Intrepid

Another IF I made last sum­mer. I really enjoyed mak­ing this one!! You play as a really unlucky wiz­ard who has to go on a crash course of learn­ing new spells to save your own ass. It’s heav­ily inspired by Terry Pratchett’s Disc World.

Down­load Intrepid.gblorb to play on a desk­top inter­pre­tor of your choice.

I’d pre­fer you play on your desk­top, but if you must you can play through your browser here. Seri­ously though, you’ll miss out on some amaz­ing in-game art­work if you play in the browser. It won’t take you too long to install a desk­top inter­pre­tor using the above link I promise!

Volcano IF

Play Vol­cano in your browser

This Win­ter quar­ter at UCSC, my final win­ter quar­ter :(,  I took Inter­ac­tive Sto­ry­telling with Michael Mateas (that genius dude behind Façade). It was a bril­liant class! Mateas had just come back from sab­bat­i­cal and was rather perky the whole quar­ter. We had a chance to break down the do-games-really-need-stories debate in a very aca­d­e­mic way, that is to say we deter­mined the two sides are both highly sub­jec­tive so there­fore the debate will never cease. Games are rather expres­sive but we can prob­a­bly agree they aren’t expres­sive enough. So instead of get­ting caught up in an end­less debate, let’s make new and inter­est­ing things and make games a bet­ter medium over­all!  (If only you could have been to some of Pro­fes­sor Mateas’ inspir­ing lectures).

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