TL; DR
I was sick half the week so I didn’t accomplish much. Worked on refining the beginning part of the SDG theory paper. For teaching, I had grading, quiz creation, and made some minor improvements to assignment instructions. Feeling overwhelmed and not all the way better.
Weekly Update Breakdown
Accomplishments Since My Last Update
- Writing (SDG theory)
- Updated abstract, citations, and gathered ACM CCS Concepts.
- Research (Project CODE Switch)
- Started learning GML. The only positive thing I have to say about GML is that it is better than JavaScript. My brother told me that by the transitive property that it is also better than R.
- This has been a roadblock because I am unclear what the best way to implement the sim in GML. (I would just do structs and classes in C#.) I believe I have an idea of how to implement it. I really wish we were using an OO language though.
- Teaching
- Is going well. Getting lots of good feedback to help improve the class from post-presentation writeups. That was an excellent idea I had. 🙂
- Self-care dailies
- Thank goodness for these! Helping me stay sane. The extra daylight is making me feel better as well.
- Executive
- I did the NCFDD’s core curriculum #2: “Sunday Meetings.” It was good to listen to the webinar on 1.5X speed. I gained some new insights on the benefits of Sunday meetings and how to frame some concepts (like feeling overwhelmed from a massive to-do list) and creative ways to handle it.
- One thing to note: the idea that the weekly plan (created during a Sunday meeting) is flexible. It isn’t meant to be rigid. Sometimes life happens and can through off your plan (happened to me right after I did the webinar!) and then you should take some time to replan.
- I did the NCFDD’s core curriculum #2: “Sunday Meetings.” It was good to listen to the webinar on 1.5X speed. I gained some new insights on the benefits of Sunday meetings and how to frame some concepts (like feeling overwhelmed from a massive to-do list) and creative ways to handle it.
Next Week’s Tasks
- Writing (SDG Theory)
- Keep going through Rogelio’s notes and re-framing paper based on design rationale
- Research (Project CODE)
- Help finish the vertical slice
- Basic Sim model
- Hero Pool
- Help finish the vertical slice
- Teaching
- Create quiz 10
Speed Bumps & Obstacles
- Research: Project CODE Switch
- Learning GML
- Getting over freaking GML (Maybe I’ll like it later????????) This is causing me a lot of anger and frustration. Had I known that I would have been asked to do core programming I would have pushed for Unity so I could have worked in a powerful programming language. I freaking hate programming in GML-like languages and it makes me very angry. I feel incredibly frustrated and really really mad.
- Rant: it also makes me really really frustrated that these game engines have to write their own languages like they’re going to make something better than other languages that built and used by teams 10s-1000s times bigger than their little game engine team. No, you are not going to write a language that is better than C# or Python and make a great game engine. It hasn’t been done, and if it is done, it will be done by a very large team and/or take another 50 years. It’s freaking ridiculous! These game-engine-made languages are so limited. And why require a programmer to learn yet another crappy language when if you used a language that is both popular and powerful the game programmer to actually do their job: program a game. It really infuriates me.
- Executive
- Getting the rest of the way better.
- Managing overwhelm and stress
Nancy Games 