Back to work

The Fall semester ended with a bang, and a selection of two games the students will be working on for the next two semesters. After all the buzz around Opera Slinger, they jumped right in, and many of them worked on research for their games over the Christmas break. Now, we're seeing lots of prototyping, storyboards, concept art and design ideas being thrown around, which is always an exciting time as the games take shape.

I've been spending a lot of time over the last month or two working with programming students on their interview skills, mainly by giving mock interviews and sample programming tests. It's always exciting to see how much better they get at interviewing after just a couple sessions of being asked technical questions. Once they get some confidence, their whole demeanor changes and they interview much more successfully.

I'm almost done with the classwork for my PhD program, which I'm doing here at UCF in Modeling and Simulation. This semester, I'm taking a class called Advanced Computer Graphics, which is actually turning out to be a very interesting, rewarding class. We're talking a lot about raytracing, something the professor insists is moving toward realtime applications like games. Last semester, I took a class in neural networks, where I wrote my own neural network for a game and had the game difficulty adjust as the game was played. It was a fun project, and taught me a lot about what's possible when you have a lot of CPU power to dedicate to AI.

I'm looking forward to going across the street to the Magic game tonight - they're hosting the Bucks. They started out hot this year, but have fallen into a bad stretch lately - hopefully my presence there tonight can help then get a much needed win.