Doubtless my fans (all three of you!) have been worried about my 2+ month absence from the interwebs. Since about mid-May I’ve been swamped with work — homework, tests, obligations from my student group, etc — and have had very little time to log in and read Iris’s forums, much less the time to write any posts of substance (or even lack of substance).

Where I’ve been

The big project I completed recently was making a DS game. Like, a real one and not just a “Look at the pretty collision detection!” homework assignment. Well, I consider it to be a completed alpha version. There are a couple bugs and the interface is crappy, but the main game runs properly. It’s a Tower Defense genre game called “Flower Defense”, in which the towers are flowers and the enemies are bugs. I don’t have any screen shots but if I ever burn it onto a ROM I’ll take some shots of it running from my DS. I intend to continue working on it over the next few years because I would like to use it in my portfolio.

I also submitted a “beta” version of an arkanoid game for my DirectX class and have to submit a “finished” version (with scores, sounds, and animations) by Thursday, but it’s actually a lot more rough than my DS game. Of course, the expectations were different and I spent a lot less time on this than I did on my DS. I’ll be glad to get it over with, because it really is crap.

Where I’m going

Today we decided the groups for this year’s Hal Event Week (HEW) project, which for us is to make a DS game. Our class is 32 people, which divided into 6 groups (4 five-people groups and 2 six-people groups). When deciding who would become the leaders, Masuda-sensei (our teacher) asked for volunteers and we ended up with exactly 6 people volunteering, myself included. So, I’m the leader of a five-person team for HEW.

I’m excited because, despite not getting all my first choices, I have a solid group of smart, dependable people and as long as I don’t drop the ball I think we’ll end up with a good end product. I really, really want to place in the competition this year, especially since I didn’t last year. Winning the gold would rock, but I’ll be happy as long as we win something. Of course, if we can make a really good game, we’ll get a chance to enter it in the Tokyo Game Show competition next June, which would just make me die of happiness.

So, what all that means is that my life for the next 6+ months is going to be devoted to working with my team to make the best damned game ever. We have our first official meeting on Wednesday, where I need to have the tentative Coding Guidelines written up as well as a tentative schedule worked out. This, of course, with me still having to finish my DirectX game and Flash game, as well as write up a one page report on the DS game I finished.

In summary, it’s probably going to be a long time before I update again. But I’ll try to keep a presence on the forums and not let e-mails pile up too badly. Wish me luck!

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.

So, our school year ends after the first week of March, but our normal classes actually end in February. The first week of March is taken up by Hal Event Week (HEW), a competition where students show off their projects (video games for gaming students, web pages for web students, etc).

The second, third, and fourth years have been doing group projects for the past few months, but we first years basically have February to create our project alone. Apparently last year the first years did group projects as well, but there were problems so this year it was switched to be individual.

So! I thought up my game design a few days ago:

Name: Untitled (I can’t think up names to save my life)
Type: Adventure/Puzzle
Story: You (a princess) have been captured by an evil sorceress and have to escape.

Gameplay: Each level is a different puzzle, there are three levels:

• Level 1: You start in a room, when you walk to the door you have to pick the lock (a Mastermind-style game).
• Level 2: You have to get outside by choosing doors (and finding keys to unlock the doors).
• Level 3: You’re outside, but not safe yet! Navigate the labyrinth to find the exit.

I’m stuck using the console API, which means that I can only use ASCII art (no graphics) but the good thing about Japanese is that not only can I use kanji (I’m going to use the Japanese word for princess — 姫 — as the player avatar), but I can also use squares (□), circles (◎), etc. which makes my life a bit easier.

I think I should be able to get this done in a month, especially since I’ve already coded a Mastermind program and I’m currently working on a labyrinth game for my programming class. But, then again, I have a tendency to think bigger than I have time to code, so we’ll see.

I don’t think I’ll win the competition or anything, but if I can make an interesting game I’ll be happy. Anyway, wish me luck!

I would just like it to be a matter of record that I hate programming for the Windows command prompt console.

For class we’re doing a Battleship game and I wanted to have input be by using the arrow keys and pressing Enter. Which I did! But instead of it being something nice like, keyboardState.IsKeyDown(Keys.Up) , this is what I had to do:

rewind(stdin);
input1 = getch();

if ( input1 == 224 ) {

  input2 = getch();

  if ( input2 == 72 ) { // up arrow pressed
    //action
  }

  if ( input2 == 80 ) { // down arrow pressed
    //action
  }

  if ( input2 == 75 ) { // left arrow pressed
    //action
  }

  if ( input2 == 77 ) { // right arrow pressed
    //action
  }
}

Note that it takes two characters for the arrow keys (other keys only need 1). It’s not that it’s hard or anything like that… just… annoying.

It’s only a few months until 2nd year (and programming for the DS!)… it’s only a few months until 2nd year (and programming for the DS!)………

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…

The results for the Systems Administrator (for those interested, it’s run by the IPA) test came out today.

Here were my results:
First Half: 580/800
Second Half: 570/800

A pass is 600/800 on both sections. If I had gotten like 2 or 3 more questions right on each section I would have passed. Let me just smack my head against the desk repeatedly. Well, it could have been worse. I just need to buckle down and study for the Fundamental Information Technology test.

In other news, we got our report cards in the mail a few weeks ago. I’m doing extremely well, which means a lot more to me than passing some lousy standardized test. Even if I need to pass the next lousy standardized test if I want to work in a Japanese gaming company.

First, for all of you wondering how the HAL-MODE FESTIVAL went, I did a writeup for Cerise: Seeing the Future of Game Design at the 2008 HMF.

The Systems Administrator exam is coming up on Sunday. I am so going to fail it. I’ve spent this week and last week doing nothing but preparing for the test, so I know a lot more about the subjects we need to know than I did before but passing is just not going to happen. And this is the last year for us to take this particular test because they’re retiring it. Oh well, at least I know how to better study for the Basic Information exam.

Less than 2 days until the HAL-MODE FESTIVAL. Everyone has off tomorrow, but being part of the Assistant Staff means that I have to drag my ass out and take a tour of where the HMF is being held so that when the high schooler I’m showing around asks burning questions such as, “Where’s the bathroom?” I won’t give them a blank stare or start crying or something.

I mostly just hope that I’ll get a nice and chatty student, so when I have obvious Japanese Fail it won’t result in an awkward silence that lasts for several hours. No, seriously, when I was in charge of entertaining prospective students during the AO (dunno what it stands for; it’s basically a mock class so prospective students can get a feel for the school) there was like 5 minutes of awkward silence in which all my efforts to start up a conversation died a miserable, embarrassing death. I ended up telling them random facts about the school until more people arrived. My reputation as “the weird foreigner” is justly deserved, believe me.

So, anyway, I’ll have more to report on this time-honored school tradition of mine later (the HMF, not letting weird foreigners be in charge of entertaining prospective students). Just felt like giving a random update, since it’s much easier to do that than to do more work on the FAQs.

So, we got our homework for summer break (at least, I think we have all of it… but knowing my teacher he might spring another assignment or two on us tomorrow).

We have to do about 170 questions in preparation for our certification exams and show the work for them. We also got assigned 5 pages of problems involving C++, but I already did all but one. Some of my friends have started the homework and they’re already despairing. I’m going to see what can be done on the plane ride home…. then I need to figure out a schedule for getting everything done while still having time to, you know, visit my family and friends.

Homework over break is definitely one of the things that I don’t like about going to school in Japan…