Fri Jan 31
time // oh time // got sucked into a culture // living like you do
🤝 Week 9 felt a little light on progress and content - so I held off on posting a reflection and will now cover the past 2 weeks!
🎮 These weeks have driven me deeper into game development! I have been primarily learning the intricacies of Tiled
, an open source, tile-based map editor that deserves its own blog post (coming soon™!). I haven’t really messed with this kind of software since discovering an ancient version of Photoshop on my mom’s desktop in middle school lol. I’ve been wrestling with layers and sprite dimensions and texture packing and the like, and I finally have a (tiny) walkable town up and running: https://iconix.github.io/rc-impossible-town/nadj-land/ (easter egg: try approaching the door on the green house). I even presented it at half-baked demos! Beware of some mysterious vertical bars if you’re on mobile: it’s a rendering quirk that I’ve decided to live with for now, after a frustrating day of debugging. Excited to pair with a batch-mate on squashing this bug soon!
🤖 For “Impossible Stuff Day” round 2 (which I had to catch up on during a rare weekend session), I explored adding NPCs with personalities to my town. Each character got a personality type (shy, outgoing, formal, mysterious, playful, or melancholic) that influences their movement and emoji usage. The NPCs only speak in emojis! While this kind of emoji bombardment might not be the final direction for my town, getting the idea into prototype-y code helped clarify what might make these NPCs genuinely interesting. More experiments to come!
🦀 Tried something completely new in my first Pairing Bot session - writing Rust! Spent a breezy 2½ hours with my partner learning about its syntax, its ownership model, and other language-specific quirks while implementing Conway’s Game of Life (again!). I haven’t had to think about pointers and references since undergrad. Even tested my understanding of ownership right after with a borrow checker game, written by a fellow batch-mate! Scored a 3 out of 5 on my first try :)
đź’Ľ Had an illuminating career advice chat that helped shape my thinking about what comes after RC. A batch-mate-turned-mentor helped me realize that my job hunt uncertainty likely stems from a mild conflict of desires (wanting both stability and the freedom to pursue my own interests), rather than not knowing what I want, like I came in thinking. Now that I know better, hopefully I can do better and find a good company fit out there.
👯 Started attending more social events again towards the end of this sprint, after realizing I’d been too heads-down on the game lately. “Chart Chat” with the gang was particularly refreshing - although, I am really trying to resist the urge to keep building a Bachelor franchise visualization…
🌟 Found myself trying to reconnect with the joy at RC, despite a continued string of real-life disruptions: multiple layers of childcare falling through, a broken garage door opener, a dead car battery, and a 2-hour daycare delay due to… simply, cold weather. Working remotely while parenting continues to be a daily adventure. With only 2 weeks left (!!), I am feeling both the pressure to reach some sort of finish line with this portfolio site project and a renewed appreciation for the unique environment we have here at RC. It is time to make these final weeks count!