Biweekly Blog: Non-Biweekly Edition

Another deadline missed, another opportunity to return to the Biweekly Blog and go… whoops.

In any case, there is quite a bit to go through: conventions, job calls, new developer contacts, SFML fun, and more! I’ll try and keep this brief:

• General: The only obstacle at this point, outside of Summer classes, is getting a job in games: Gameplay, Engine, Tools, you name it. It would be my pleasure to get these jobs, seeing as I enjoy those kinds of work, particularly tools - happy devs make happy games! Thankfully, I have gotten in contact with a few individuals now, so we’ll see where those go.

  In addition, I have visited a few conventions since last post (see Twitter… /plug) and have met a fair few developers who share similar interests! Hey, this whole networking thing works, who woulda thunk it? I’m curious to see where those threads end up in the future.

• School: I don’t think I talked about my current quarter yet, but for posterity’s sake, I would like to mention it: one class in cryptography as it pertains to networking, one class on analysis of algorithms, and a Latin class. In addition, I am continuing VR research this quarter and most likely into the Summer as well. Fun stuff!

• SFML: What started as a reason to brush up on C++ slowly turned into an ambitious little 2D “engine” with a friend and I. Currently, progress is on a short break, but last place I had left it was building out Nodes that behave properly in a scene graph, and wrappers for input and configuration file parsing. We want to go back and see if we can fit some ECS ideas in there as well, just to say we did it. You can see the progress here!

  Why would you keep up another project when you have talked about so many others, you may ask? Well, this project for me is unique in that everything else has been done in C#. While I love C#, I need to do more C++ work and round out my skillset. As much as Mega Man Maker, the 2D light/platforming game, or a myriad of other projects are appealing to me right now, I would like to have a tangible C++ project finished in the next several months. However, we’ll see just how much time I have left over for other fun things.

And that’s that for now. In the future, I really want to talk more about other projects as well, but the thing about those are - they haven’t gone anywhere yet. It’s my fault for that of course, but it’s nevertheless frustrating. When I do make a post on-time in two weeks (and I will!), I will be sure to say something, anything, about more than just one SFML project!