This past week has been a whirlwind! Building a city, visiting Blizzard, and, most importantly, beating Stanford for homecoming! I don’t even know where to start, so I guess I’ll just start at the beginning.
For my final project of my Software Engineering class, I am leading a group of seven programmers in planning and building a SimCity. Read a little more about the specifics here! Now that we’ve got the design down, this past week has been a whirlwind of adding restaurants, markets, homes, banks, and more to our city and starting to put it all together. Each of our simulations works on its own, and now all we have left is to string them together and give them images to show whats going on. It’s been really interesting how we’ve discovered different aspects of the project as we’ve gone along. For example; roads no longer have a single type. Instead, there are now roads for traveling clockwise, counter-clockwise, both directions plus a crosswalk, sidewalks, and turn-ins to locations. All of these different types represent a different kind of interaction with both people and cars, just like real people behave differently depending on if a road is one-way or a crosswalk.
In addition to this, my Video Game Production class got a little “cold” this week. We went to go tour Blizzard Entertainment! Unfortunately, we had to sign a non-disclosure agreement upon entering, so I can’t tell you everything about it, but it was incredible to get to hear from designers like Jeffrey Kaplan and see all the work going on with the newly announced Diablo III expansion. Below are a couple of pictures we were allowed to take while inside!
Finally, I capped off the week by going to cheer on the Trojan football team as they fought on to victory against Stanford! ESPN College Gameday came to campus in the morning to start off the celebration, and later we headed off to the Colosseum to show our Trojan pride! Everyone stormed the field after we won, and it was a great moment for the Trojans!
Overall, my week has been incredibly busy, and incredibly fun! I hope to see y’all next week! Fight on!
~Patrick
