End of the Semester Post. Summer Internship!

Yesterday was the final day of classes, and last week I got the Acxiom internship! The position is as a Data Solution Developer, and I am very excited for this opportunity. I start on May 23rd and already went through the background check and drug test required. A lot of things are going right for me, and I hope to continue that all summer. With the Acxiom internship, I will be making regular posts on here about how the internship is going. This internship means that I will have to stay in Conway over the summer, which I am still waiting to get approved. Also, Disco Tray Studios has been approved for a 15 minute panel to speak at Play Make Learn in Madison, WI August 8-9!

Cultivating Competencies

A lot of new content for this game is now implemented. We implemented the scenes I talked about in my last post and we created new characters. A new Demo was sent to our Career Services clients and they gave us a lot of good feedback. They intend to have their student workers play through the demo as well, but we have not heard anything else back about that. Some of the feedback we got from them we were able to quickly fix such as wording and consistency issues.

Climate Goes Political

I’ve been doing a lot of map work on Climate Goes Political to make the cities more different. It has been a challenge to alter these cities in this way, but it is all really coming together. The world has also been going through changes in-between the cities. I have been adding more hills, lakes, and rivers to remove the flat look. Ideally, we will see that each city is easy to distinguish from the others, and the map will be interesting enough to look at.

This School Year @ Disco Tray Studios

This year has been a very productive one for me at Disco Tray Studios. I started it with learning how to make this blog, and it has changed immensely since then. Ian and I worked hard and ended up producing four games that are up on itch.io

• First was Astronomical Bodies, which was a pain to work, and took forever to actually figure out how to make faster. However this was very rewarding in the end, and everybody ended up being happy with the new elements of it.
• Then came ChemSim, which was fun to work on. We redid the UI, made everything easier to read, and fixed some animations. We never received new combinations to add to the game, so you could say it is incomplete.
• After that I focused on Climate Goes Political. This was my project in the GameDev course and I felt inclined to finish it. There wasn’t much that was needed to be done, and it has since been used twice in his class.
• @itsmaya was the next big project. We had to unravel the code, delete repeated code, change the purchase system, and update the UI to it. This game was difficult to work on, but helped us prepare for our current project.
• Currently we are working on Cultivating Competencies. This game is the only one where we started from scratch; it is also the only one where we didn’t use Unity to create it. It has been difficult to write the story for this because we had no real starting point.

Connor and I created the framework for the new Solar Eclipse Event Website, which was my WebDev project.

Disco Tray Studios has made me do a lot of things that I don’t usually do. I have had to learn a lot of new techniques and a lot of new software. This has been a really good year and I can’t wait to continue to improve over the years.

Next School Year @ Disco Tray Studios

Next year I plan to do much of the same work that I have been doing this year at Disco Tray Studios. I intend to continue on the Game Development projects, with some Web Development included as well. Then, in the Spring Semester I hope to start work on App Development since I will have taken the class. I want to focus on speed of work without taking a hit to the quality of work. A lot of projects are piling up at Disco Tray Studios, so if I can speed up my work process, then we should be able to get through them all easier. Currently, we are taking in more projects than we are putting out, but the increase in work force next year will also help this issue. There is a lot that I want to do. Such as reworking Climate Goes Political to a better system visually, making the Cultivating Competencies game engaging and fun, and getting experience in areas that I am currently lacking.

What’s Coming Up?

• Start internship at Acxiom
• Finish making the Climate Goes Political map cohesive.
  • Make the whole world change depending on different pollution levels.
  • Have the NPC be able to be destroyed by business as usual.
  • Make the cities look even more different on every city level.
• Continue working on a better landing page for this blog.
• Create a logo for my blog (Might be done? Unsure)
• Change “Projects” page to be a portfolio.
• Edit all the pages connected to the WIP landing page.

TL;DR

• The Semester is over
• I got an internship at Acxiom
• We made a new Demo for Career Services’ game
• I have made more progress on the Climate Goes Political map