CS373 Spring 2021: Ian Thorne (Week 6)
What did you do this past week?
This past week, I mostly focused on my 3D game development capstone. Since we lost a week to the winter storm, we’re still in early phases and figuring out our workflow. I suspect that once we’ve figured that sort of thing out, it will all go a lot smoother and I’ll be able to spend less time on it — at least I hope so. This week, we white-boxed the first level of our game and finished off the core mechanics necessary to complete it. If you’re curious, white-boxing is essentially creating a version of the level with no art assets, to make sure that it’s actually playable and interesting, before committing to producing art assets for it. My group for this class and I also got started on the IDB1 project, but more on that later.
What’s in your way?
This week, I — currently — don’t have too terribly much to do (hopefully it stays that way, so the main thing would be just staying focused. It’s hard to stay focused sitting at the same desk all day, but when classes started back up on Wednesday, I noticed that I was doing a pretty good job of staying on task. Ideally, I’ll keep that going and have a pretty smooth week (but you know, we’ll see).
What will you do next week?
This week, my capstone group needs to produce the “first playable” version of our game, which includes fixing a few bugs, adding a dialogue system, and putting art assets in our white-boxed level. I think we’ll be able to do that without too many hiccups, so ideally I’ll get to spend a lot more time on the IDB1 project with my group for this class. If my schedule does say relatively free, I’ll also try to use this week as an opportunity to get ahead on grading for the class I’m proctoring.
If you read it, what did you think of the Single Responsibility Principle?
I thought that the idea of the Single Responsibility Principle (SRP) made a lot of sense, but it seemed like it would be incredibly easy to not follow without really thinking about it. I typically like to spend a fair amount of time planning out my solutions on paper and thinking through the possible corner-cases that could pop up, so I appreciated that following the SRP fits nicely into that workflow. It definitely seems like something that needs a lot of practice, since I think I could very easily separate too much functionality and introduce needless complexity like the article talked about.
What was your experience of IDB1 and reduce?
I’ll start with reduce since it was significantly shorter. I thought it made a lot of sense and my breakout group was able to finish it off in just a couple minutes — though a lot of that is probably owed to Dr. Downing’s explanation of how the function behaves. As far as IDB1 goes, my group is really just getting started and I haven’t been able to contribute as much as I’d like to on account of my other classes. I’ll be focusing on front-end stuff, at least for this project, which is exciting, since I tend to find user-facing software development more interesting than backend development. At the moment, I’m a little overwhelmed by knowing practically nothing about Javascript, React, Bootstrap, AWS, and everything else involved in the web project (though I imagine that’s by design). After I finish this blog post I’ll be diving into Javascript and React — starting with figuring out what it is I even need to install…
How did you fare in the storm?
My parents and I were super lucky through the storm. I mentioned it in a short blog post I wrote last week, but we’re a little north of Austin and we didn’t end up losing power or water throughout the storm, which I’m super thankful for. I tried to use it as an opportunity to catch up on work and just take a breather since I was starting to feel pretty stressed out about school.
What made you happy this week?
This week, I was happy to get the chance to watch some TV with my parents. We’ve been watching a reality show called Undercover Billionaire and it’s absolutely awesome. The first season aired a little over a year ago and the premise was that a billionaire named Glenn Stearns was flown to a city he’d never been to with only a pickup truck, a new smartphone, and a hundred dollars, with ninety days to build a business worth one million dollars, or he’d have to put a million dollars of his own money into it. The second season is airing right now and it’s got three new people attempting the challenge. It’s a really interesting show with a lot of cool business tips and some pretty unique situations.
What’s your pick-of-the-week or tip-of-the-week?
Well… I did just rant about a TV show, so I’d definitely recommend it if you’ve got time to watch it. On the software development side of things, I guess I’ll recommend finding some tutorials about React and web development fundamentals. One of my friends recommended this React tutorial to me so I know I’ll be checking it out. I can’t say for sure if I’d recommend it yet since I haven’t watched it, but regardless, if you’re in this class, I’d recommend looking into web development tutorials as soon as possible. With any luck, I’ll have something much more useful to recommend next week!
