Howdy everyone! It looks like the semester is coming to a close, and boy has it just flown by! It only seems fitting here at the end of the semester to recall my top 10 experiences from Fall ’13.
In no particular order, here we go!
1. Discover
I had a great time meeting a ton of you guys at Discover! It was awesome to see so many people out excited about Viterbi, and I loved getting to help out with those of you who are going through your application process and trying to learn more to make a decision about coming to USC.
2. Video Games Final Project
I’d post a picture, but technically I’m under a non-disclosure agreement with some of the artwork. For my final project in my games class, I’m making a prototype for a mobile application that runs a Final Fantasy style battle with a match-3 game (like Candy Crush) as controls. The best part: Riot-made League of Legends Sprites! This project is an extension of an in-class game jam, sponsored by Riot Games, that my class held, and I’m really excited to port the game over to Android (and unfortunately have to re-skin it) over Winter Break!
3. California Adventure
Disneyland, it’s the happiest place on Earth; how could it not make the top 10? I had a ton of fun running around, riding roller coasters, and generally letting my inner kid free. Best of all, we had front row viewing for World of Color, which was fantastic!
Tatsu, my favorite ride
4. Fright Fest
Six Flags: Fright Fest was a great way to celebrate the Halloween season! Monsters and clowns roaming the park, night-time rides where you can really feel like you’re flying, and plenty of things to pop out and scare you made it a frighteningly good time!
5. TKE Halloween
My fraternity, Tau Kappa Epsilon, held a big event for Halloween this year, which was awesome! We brought in our own DJ and danced the night away!
6. My Cousin Daniel’s Wedding
I went home one weekend this semester to go to my cousin Daniel’s wedding. He’s always been a great cousin and I was really happy to see him and Crystal at their wedding. It was really nice to take a weekend out to relax and spend some time with family since they were unable to come out to Parent’s Weekend this year.
7. Riot Tour
This place is cool! My Video Game Production class got to get a personal tour of the Riot Games headquarters and see some of the work they have in development as well as a first hand view of their development process. It was really interesting to use them as a case study and learn about how such a large franchise was created and managed.
8. Blizzard Tour
Very similar to the Riot tour, the Blizzard Entertainment tour was another really cool experience to see Diablo in the making. It was a fantastic experience to learn how networked games are produced and how relations are maintained and new content created and pushed out from such a well established company. You can read more about it here.
9. ACM Hackathon
The Association for Computing Machinery, a computer professionals club that I’m in, held it’s annual HackSC Fall Hackathon this year, which was really cool to experience. You can read more about it here and here.
10. Pac-Man Adventures
This was one of my projects for my video game production class, and it was awesome to put my own twist on a classic game like Pac-Man! I essentially turned Pac-Man into a Mario-style platformer, with the objective still being to avoid ghosts (and other enemies) while eliminating the enemies and collecting all of the dots.
