Due to a swine flu scare, school is out at least until Saturday. One would think I would be like, “Sweet, no school!” but no. For the first time in my life I was like, “Nooooooooooooo!”
Not just because school is awesome, but because it meant that I had to reschedule two meetings that were planned this week (one is going to be over MSN, the other at my house). I also can’t do any DS programming while school is closed. And with an extra week to work on a programming assignment that we get marked on, it means that I have to make it THAT MUCH BETTER because I don’t have the excuse of having no time.
Thanks, swine flu. 
Current Deadline: Finish basic gameplay by February 19
Current Progress: Start room and level 1 finished
Not sure if things are going better than expected, or worse. On the one hand, I’ve spent a lot of time procrastinating (or taking care of other things). I got sidetracked by an assignment to code a SameGame, which ate up about a week of class time. Then, this week (literally the day after I finished it, of course) my teacher said we no longer had to turn it (people complained that they didn’t have time to do their HEW project). Getting the display to work like I want it to always seems to take twice, or three times, the amount of time I expected it to. And don’t get me started on debugging.
But, I have some time tomorrow during my AS work shift to start on level 2. Since the basic game mechanics are the same as the start room I’ll have a solid base to work with, so that’s a plus. Level 3 is a labyrinth game that I coded for an assignment (that, if I recall correctly, we didn’t actually turn in). I want to make some modifications to it (clean up the board creation algorithms and add guards who move about the labyrinth randomly) but absolute worst case scenario I can do with simply porting it.
Assuming I make the March 19 deadline (ie. have all my levels coded and debugged), that gives me about a week to add the storyline and other text (explanation of the rules, controls, etc). The only problem is that everyone is going to be busy with their HEW assignment so I might not be able to get my friends to proofread my Japanese… which will undoubtedly result in hilarity when my senpai come and play the game. Hilarity for them, that is. Naturally, I will want to crawl under a rock and die.
Even if it does have cringe worthy awesome Japanese mistakes, though, my game is going to rock. Well, as much as a game coded for the console API can rock, that is.
PS. The game has a name: 『魔女の館』 (“The Witch’s Mansion”)! I wanted it to be “The Sorceress’ Tower”, but that didn’t sound right in Japanese.
As usual, I’ve been super busy.
I took the J-Ken Practical Information test (level 2) and passed. I’m expecting an 80-90% score on it. My friends say that I could have passed level 1 with no problems, but I’m glad I just stuck with level 2. It feels good to do well on one of those bloody tests.
Other than that, it’s been the same old grind: class, homework, AS duties, with occasional breaks where I hang out with friends. I had to give a 5 minute presentation on Wednesday for the AS. I’m actually pretty miserable at getting up in front of people and talking so it was pretty brutal, especially since I had to stand there and listen to criticism afterwards. But, hey, the only way to get better is to do these things so whatever.
I think I failed the big CS test we had on Thursday, partly because I didn’t have any time to study and partly because it was half math problems and I have trouble with those. I don’t feel that I got even 50% of the questions right, so I might have to retake it. These were actually student-made problems, and I think the math problems were harder than the ones on the real test are because those at least tend to be a little better with using intuitive numbers (calculators aren’t allowed). Oh well.
My winter break starts today, but I don’t think it’s going to be very restful. First off, I have a lot of homework. I already finished my CASL homework, but I have 100 CS problems to do, a 1 page report on something relating to the Showa period, two reports on what we would do with a DVD that had 1TB of memory (for a contest, which means we also give up our rights to the ideas we come up with… boo), and create a mini text-based RPG (I’m modeling mine after MUDs). And I need to find the time to do all that in between my my AS duties (I have a work shift Monday morning, a meeting with my group mates about the AS New Years’ party, etc) and other plans.
The next few weeks are going to be fun, but not exactly more restful than my normal schedule…
I should be worrying about the upcoming J-Ken, but instead I find myself thinking about the fact that I’m going to have to take a test before I can become employed. This is apparently standard practice for Japanese companies, and I know that big companies like Nintendo are notorious for having difficult math portions.
Are there any American companies that do this? I mean, most of my friends are employed and I have never heard of any of them having to take a test… not even those who are game programmers (which is where I’ll have to start out in all likelihood). Am I just that oblivious, or is it really just that Japan in particular believes the malarkey that tests are the best way to measure aptitude?
I was asked to post a follow up to my first article, so I pulled from First Impressions and wrote the rest from scratch (I later used the “Academic Life” section as the foundation for A glimpse into my academic life). Check it out: My Search for a Japanese Game School Part II: Inside.
Today, when talking about the history of video games my teacher mentioned that 1987 was when he first bought the Famicon (ie. NES). Then he asked all of the students who hadn’t been born yet to raise their hands. 90% of the class did.
The NES was my first console. Ever. I’m old enough to have played games on my friend’s Atari. Heck, I remember when hard drives were measured in megabytes. My computer back in the States has an old 3.6 gig HD in it and I remember when I was excited because of how big that was.
25 isn’t that old. Really. But thinking about how my real experience is simply “history” to my classmates sure makes me feel old.
I was asked to do an adaptation of my Where I started and Getting into HAL posts for Game Career Guide. The finished article, My Search for a Japanese Game School, includes tightened prose and some information on the curriculum that I didn’t include in the articles here. Be sure to check it out!
Andrea Rubenstein