[Game] Stuff I Made On College Thanksgiving Breaks
Ah, Thanksgiving. When I think back to my college experience, Thanksgiving was a very special time when the campus emptied out, the dining halls went quiet, and you got washed over with this weird gift of unstructured time that you completely forgot how to use.
And, well, you could be grinding for interviews, 'cuz it's interview season too, but let's be honest, it's no fun grinding for interviews throughout Thanksgiving.
So you horse around a little, and sometimes you make something, or a couple things.
If you were to look at one...
Here's a game I made during a Thanksgiving break of college. It was inspired by my wanderings around the Pittsburgh Center for Creative Reuse.
I told myself that I would scan my pencil drawings and turn them into fully rendered digital illustrations, then the semester picked up.
That doesn't mean the story lacks heart, though. You can play it here → ⭒ play
- click the dialogue box to advance dialogue
- i trust that you can figure out the rest of the controls
...and all the rest
In my freshman November, I found a funny flag in .png images such that some browsers render it and other browsers don't, meaning that you can encode two images in the same file. Even funnier, this means that on Discord, when you see a message in chat, it renders Image #1, then when you enlarge it, it renders Image #2.
- I made a quick proof-of-concept at the start of the month (video demo, "spooky cat")
- It's a shame I didn't fully document how I did it, but apparently I had enough time on my hands to dig into file formats because discrete math and data structures and algorithms were too easy in my first semester (not at all the case in the next semester) and I had too much free time. Discord patched it so it renders images consistently and my script no longer works.
- I remember I was so proud of this that, as a baby freshman, I put it on my resume for internship applications.
- My Citadel interviewer proceeded to pick this apart with full earnesty ("...so... this 'spooky cat' project... what's the business outcome? how did you... scale this?")
- and I genuinely answered the scaling question ("uh, the cat's already at full scale").
- I think about his face a lot, and, well, I no longer have it on my resume.
Also in my freshman November, I was interviewing with a startup. Their booking system must've been a script bolted onto a Google Form, because the URL for scheduling was a sequential integer, so I could see other applicants' timeslots. I wrote a script to poll the IDs after mine and alert me if new slots were booked, reasoning that if they were still scheduling interviews for other applicants, an offer wasn't imminent.
- It pinged me twice
- I stopped waiting by the third week
In my sophomore Thanksgiving, I wrote some Linux device drivers and attempted part of a kernel starting from the bootloader, which actually came in handy when I later took OS, and learned Rust and did some wacky things to my laptop keyboard to get it to function like a piano keyboard.
My junior and senior Thanksgivings were probably my most technically impressive (game engine, toy compiler, deep learning stuff), but I find I have less to say about them. The projects got harder to explain at a dinner table, and so I see my freshman and sophomore Thanksgiving-horse-around projects the most fondly.
