<p>Anyone here going to the Case Western Reserve summer program (I think the broader cateogry would be the CTD Summer Program)? I'm going to be in the Computer Game Design course that starts June 25th. I can't wait!</p>
<p>So I've been here at Case for two weeks now... I can't believe how much homework we get. I worked on my weekend project for about 10 hours yesterday. Its due on Monday and its probably only halfway done. But hey I like programming, so looks like I have another day of being hunched over a keyboard for me.</p>
<p>Things I've learned in the past two weeks at Case:</p>
<p>The jukebox at Leutner is the embodiment of Satan. Thats where we eat breakfast and dinner and I haven't looked at the song selection but 95% of what comes out of it is bad early 90's stuff. The worst part about it is it is FREE, so people can play songs on it all day long for no money if they want to.</p>
<p>The food isn't great, but its bearable. The only places we get free lunch at are BRB (Biomedical Research Building), Tomlinson, and Einstein Bagels. I haven't gone to the bagel place. Tomlinson has a better selection of food than BRB I think (even if it does have a smaller variety) but the wait for food there is really long. BRB lines aren't nearly as bad as Tomlinson. I went to BRB a couple times but now I always go to Tomlinson because its only a 2 minute walk as opposed to like a 10 minute walk to BRB (going from Olin, where I take my class).</p>
<p>Living in a dorm is pretty fun, but I can't wait to be home again (one more week!). There are a lot of fun people here. The whole resident teaching assistant thing is awesome. The TA in my class lives in the dorm two doors down from me, incase I ever need help on something. Plus my roommate knows a lot more about coding than I do, which helps.</p>
<p>I thought the class was going to be more about broader concepts of game design, as opposed to how to code a game. I have probably made at least 7500 lines of code in the past two weeks. This was a shock for me because I basically had no prior programming experience (I took a "programming" class in school where we copied code from a book for the first 5 minutes of class and then played Quake over the LAN for the rest of the hour), so its been hard to keep my head above the water.</p>
<p>I am completely amazed at how much has been crammed into my head in the past two weeks. When I came here, I couldn't program "Hello World" in anything but BASIC. Last weekend I wrote "Pong", and this week's weekend project is making a platformer game! I spent all of yesterday getting my tile system to work and started on collision. Today I am going to have to put in the collision system, the camera, all of the sprites, and enemy AI. I have a lot of work ahead of me, but besides the camera the rest of that is stuff that we learned how to implement earlier this week.</p>
<p>What is this nonsense about Leutner's jukebox?!?!?
That thing is great! Yes, I'll admit that it does have some crappy music in it, but there's nothing like a little Pearl Jam to wake you up :D</p>
<p>It'd be ok if they would just take out the damn Macarena CD..</p>