Final Questions

As my Business and Legal FOSS Class heads into its last 2 weeks of this semester, we've been called to come up with some reflective questions to answer about the course.

Here's some questions I came up with:

1. Are there any changes you would suggest making to the profile template?  What parts did you find most interesting or important?
2. If you could have spent more time, say an extra week, on any topic, which would you have liked to cover more in depth?
3. If you could have spent less time on any topic, which would you have said could be shortened?
4. What was your favorite assignment, or at least, which did you find to be the most crucial to the class?
5. What was your least favorite assignment, or which did you find to be the least important for the class?

I'm gonna miss this class :(

Weekly 13

Almost done!

My friend and I started on our Casual Game Development Final Project this week.  The guidelines are extremely open and non restrictive(which we like in the FOSS world).  We decided we were going to make a 3D game using the three js library.  The reason I am so stoked for this game, is because we decided to give it a creepy horror theme, which is something I have never done before, but I always wanted to try!

We also continued learning three js by doing some ICE's.  In the assignments, we had to gradually create a 3D version of the classic arcade game "Pong".  This was a pretty cool assignment, and especially by the last update, the game looked really cool.  We implemented shadows, lighting, and made a camera system that was pretty complex looking.  Again I highly suggest checking out three js if you're interested in 3D development of any kind within the browser world (https://github.com/mrdoob/three.js/)

Japanese Film class began wrapping up this week.  We started watching our final film Tora-San, which is actually a lighthearted comedy about a "lovable oaf".  There is a lot of, kind of, low level slapstick comedy that people who like wittier jokes might not enjoy, but I actually thought the movie was hilarious, and its a great change of pace from the more serious films we usually watch.(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otoko_wa_Tsurai_yo).

We watched our second to last film "The Baader Meinhof Complex" in my German Cinema class.  This film was pretty awesome, and it fuses elements of real historical events with dramatized action sequences.  Some people did not like this combination because they felt it made the movie to fictionalized, but I thought it made the movie way easier to watch.  In other news, I wonder what would happen if they made a Hollywood movie script an open source project...

Weekly 12

This week was at a pretty good point in the semester.  It was not quite at the point where I had a ton of work to get done for finals, and yet we were also kind of cruising towards the end of the year.  We added another profile for my Business and Legal FOSS class - always enjoyable, check it out in my blog post for Crowdfunding in Gratipay.

Biggest thing worth mentioning this week was that we started going over Three.js in my Casual Game Development class.  This library is awesome.  I can't stress that enough.  The library is open source(https://github.com/mrdoob/three.js/).  It is also logical, easy to understand, quick for demoing things, and it supports so much different stuff.  It was also great to finally formally learn about this library from a professor whereas for this whole semester, I was kind of just hacking away at the thing for my Production Studio class.

Right off the bat I learned things that I wish I knew in the beginning of the semester while working on my Production Studio demo.  We did an ICE that involved making a little 3D scene in Three js with some different primitive objects thrown together to look like a house and some trees.  We also manipulated lighting, fog, and animation using the update function.  I have always loved how in javascript you can basically create a game loop function just by calling a RequestAnimationFrame in a method("function" whatever).  If you know a bit about programming and want to develop some awesome 3D apps that run right in the browser, check out these examples to get started in three js: http://threejs.org/examples/

I guess I should talk about my other classes now.  I had to write a short response to the film we watched last week for my German Film class.  Then for my Japanese Film class, I gave film review presentations in a group for 2 films we had to watch.  1 was a samurai flick called Harakiri - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0056058/ and the other was a modern film called Taste of Tea - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0413893/

If you like quirky, stylistic, melancholy films, watch Taste of Tea.  If you like crazy samurai revenge movies, watch Harakiri.  I liked both of them :)

Weekly 11

This week it finally happened - we watched a film in my German Cinema class that wasn't extremely old and obscure.  We watched a movie called Run Lola Run, which actually did extremely well even internationally.  This was a great change for the class, because the film was very modern, upbeat, and even had some animation in it.  In terms of a national cinema, the movie showed a lot of the recently united Germany of the time.  Run Lola Run - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0130827/

In my Japanese Film class, we had to read a novel called Kokoro, and watch a movie called Tokyo Story.  I would rather not talk about these because they are pretty sad, and also honestly kind of boring.  They do a great job of showcasing the transition from Meiji to Modern Japan though.  Unfortunately, Kokoro is a novel all about being lonely and miserable, and Tokyo Story is all about a family that has drifted apart, and then something tragic happens to them.

In Casual Game Development, we learned some really cool new stuff involving Javascript and Ecmascript 6.  There are a bunch of ways to try and implement classes and real Object Oriented Programming within Javascript, and we learned about them all today.  While this is really great to learn about, I don't care much about utilizing classes in javascript as it has always felt hacky and wrong to me.  Luckily, the newer methods we learned about did actually seem more promising.

My Production Studio class put together some new demos.  I worked on the asset creation team where I got to model some towers and a bird in Maya!  This was fun because I hadn't gotten to do any 3D modeling work in awhile and I really enjoy it.  Unfortunately, after importing everyone's new changes, the projects all kind of broke, so for the next few weeks, we have to work on figuring out what is broken, and how we can fix the problems.

My Music class got our exams back from the Classical Era.  I did pretty well.  We also transitioned into the Romantic Era.  This is a pretty traditional standard class, and its kind of hard to talk about.

Weekly 10

Week 10 almost done...

We started coming to the end of our Casual Game Development ICE's this week.  We did this really neat assignment involving getting a Facebook developer account and hooking our game up as a Facebook app.  Unfortunately, although the idea was cool, very few people got the functionality working.  Most people could not even make their app require a Facebook login, let alone start loading the game.  The professor admitted that this ICE probably needs some tweaking to be helpful, and that he would have liked to go more in depth with the exercise.

My Business and Legal Aspects of FOSS class continued on with making our 3rd Profile on Startup Companies.  We chose Coinbase and you can read all about it in my other blog post!  I chose Coinbase personally because I found bitcoin to be fascinating, but I really did not know much about it at all.  I was also curious how a company based around bitcoin operated.  Again my group got together on a Wednesday evening between classes and just started researching information.

My Production Studio class recovered from our Mid Term problems last week.  What happened was students did not push any changes or work on the project until the very last minute.  Which was a serious problem because we were given about 3 weeks to work on the project.  Ultimately, I ended up sitting in the Innovation Labs literally all day and night to finish the project with some other students.  The demo ended up looking very good, but the professor was pretty disappointed in how we handled the work.  I was also pretty mad that we did not step up to complete this earlier.

Now we are working on splitting up into smaller groups and thinking of what we can add to the scene that is new and further expands the look and feel of the project.  So far we had a few different types of islands that animate based on the beat of the song imported.  The terrain also morphs based on the song, and there are various models that load to populate the scene.  This project was both awesome, and a huge pain.

Team Proposal 3

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Weekly 9

Second Profile was due for Business and Legal Aspects of FOSS.  You can read about that in my other blog post!  This one was on Fiscal Sponsorship Organizations.  My group handled the Software Freedom Conservancy.  I really liked reading about this company not just because it serves as a great business model example, but also because the SFC seems like a great company to help FOSS developers.

We watched a very artistic film called Yesterday's Girl in my German film class.  I would make a link to the film, but I don't know that its really worth watching because I am still trying to make sense of it.  The film served as a departure from traditional German film making and was an extremely stylistic, artistic, experimental movie.  It was very disjointed and hard to tell what was going on.  I did enjoy the film, I just had trouble keeping up with it.

Our second Project was due for my Casual Game Development class.  You can check out my final product here: http://alanleeson.com/ShapeShatter/shapeShatter.html.  I am actually super proud of this game and I think is one of the best games I have worked on at RIT.  The idea is, its a mobile casual game where you drag a line across the screen and try to destroy as many shapes as you can.  The game is called Shape Shatter!  We implemented some aspects from the Bubbles mobile ICE we made a few weeks ago and just went from there.

My Japanese Film class continued watching the 47 Ronin film and discussing a correlation to the Confucian relationships that governed who was to be loyal and sub servant to who.