It’s already been three weeks since school started. It seems like the year just started and we’re almost at the middle of month 3! I’ve reached a point where I can see how I can fit my classes into my work-life. It means I need to cut down on some projects.

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Ever since school started, my schedule has been hectic to say the least. The classes I’m taking are challenging, my responsibilities to my websites are still there and I still have these pet projects I want to keep working on. I don’t want to skimp out on any of those things, so I end up having to cut down on my leisure time. It’s amazing how much time I can reclaim just by cutting down on Reddit usage.

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It’s the end of the second week of school for me. It didn’t take long for me to realize that I need to catch up a lot on Math. It’s been years since I’ve taken a formal math class. Even back then, I don’t think I did well with the subject. It was a combination of being lazy and not doing the homework and giving up too soon. Now in this new semester, I’m doing it again, except the right way this time.

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So I completed Hackpoly yesterday. This past weekend in general was pretty hectic. I was actually able to get everything I wanted done. I attended the hackathon, helped a buddy move and met up with my cousin for his website idea. Now I’m sitting at Starbucks distracting myself from homework by writing this blogpost.

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So I’m sitting here outside a Starbucks waiting to go to Hackpoly. I wasn’t sure if I was going to go or not because I got added from the waitlist last minute. I was kind of hesitant at first because my schedule is already pretty insane as is. I started school this week, I’m helping a buddy move and I’m going to meet my cousin to talk about a website he wanted to make.

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So school just started again. I’ve been on break for about two months because my school runs on a semester system. It’s been a good break. I got a lot accomplished this break compared to any previous ones. After my first day of class, I started to wonder if I could keep up this level of productivity with my business-related stuff.

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It’s been a long time coming, but I finally did it - I wrote a tutorial! I’ve kept putting it off because its been so tough getting started. That’s what I along with many other people have issues with. Once you get rolling creating something, it just seems to flow pretty naturally. After I finished, I was left wondering why I didn’t do this sooner.

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So I’ve been reallyyy into webdev this past week. Like really into it. Every single day this week I’ve been learning more and more about different web technologies. I feel like the Blast Zone Studios website will soon become a sort of frankenstein-like project that’ll include all the stuff I’ve picked up recently. I suppose it isn’t too bad initially as the site is still pretty bare-bones.

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I’m writing this now because I literally spent the entire day trying to fix one bug that affected the Blast Zone Studios website. After I finally figured out how to fix it, I began to thinking about bugs in general. Yes bugs definitely suck. Bugs can take hours and hours to fix, which can completely take over a work day(as shown today), but I try to look on the bright side of things. I learn a ton from bugs. Moreso then just reading. I usually go into a project thinking I know how a particular framework works. But after I come across a bug, it really gets me to dive completely into it.

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So this past weekend, I went to SBHacks, a hackathon that was held at UCSB. It’s been years since I’ve been in that area. I used to go pretty frequently back in my late teens. Going back and seeing all the old places I used to frequent with my buddies gave me a pretty big nostalgia bomb. The city itself doesn’t look it changed too much since the last time I went there. That is definitely not a bad thing.

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So tomorrow I’ll be going to SBHacks, a hackathon at Santa Barbara. It’s been years since I’ve been to Santa Barbara. I had some of my best memories there when I was younger. Now, years later, I’m going back to make more memories. These dev events I’ve been going to lately have been great! Not only are they fun, but I end up learning a ton at each one I go to. The last few days, I’ve been preparing by getting my feet wet with different dev stacks including Parse and Nodejs.

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So this past weekend, I attended the Global Gamejam hosted at UCI. It was incredibly fun! It was great working with people who all shared the same interest in making games. Everyone had their own ideas to contribute and by the end of it, we were able to come up with something pretty great. It was a lot of work making the game, but it didn’t feel like work. I’m going to continue going to these events because the insights I’ve gained have been invaluble. However, theres a huge concern I have for attending these things - my health.

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It’s been almost a year since I really seriously worked on cocos2dx. Cocos2d was perhaps the first real game framework I worked with. Going through the process of setting up the work enviroment and actually making games taught me a heck of a lot about software development. After dappling with other engines like Unity and Unreal, I decided to take a look again at the old framework I started out with.

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I just completed my project for the Unreal Gamejam! That last day was pretty rough because I had so many bugs I put off from the previous days. I had to cut out a lot of the things I wanted to add just so the game could be presentable. I was able to get the core gameplay working, but that was it. Finishing the proper gameloop and displaying the score would’ve dramatically upped the replay value of this game, but I’m not too disappointed about how it turned out. I learned a ton more about Unreal 4 just by going through the process from start to finish.

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I’m about to start working on my project for the Unreal Engine 4 gamejam. It seems like they have it every month, so I’m hoping this becomes a a regular thing for me to put my gamedev skills to use! The theme for this one is “Back to Square One”. My initial thought was to create a rogue-like game as starting over is part of the mechanics. I want to keep making VR apps, so this one will definitely include. Unreal Engine for the most part makes it really easy to hook up games to VR. Every month Epic adds new features that make the overall development for VR smoother. I’ll go into detail of Unity and Unreal in a future blog post, but for now, I’d like to say I’m really enjoying working with Unreal at the moment. It’s just so powerful!

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After a long time coming, I’ve finally gotten around to updating my website. Before, I was using about.me. The service looked pretty nice, but it wasn’t free. I got a one year pass through github’s student pack along with other free subscriptions. Looking at this longterm, I would much prefer a free solution, so I decided to switch over to github pages. I was able to get Jekyll up and running to power this blog. Seems really good so far.

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