LinsenBlog

So once again, I've neglected my website's blog and have kinda just let the whole thing die. My bad. I feel like I only made this site in the first place as a 'living resume', but I never really had to search for a job so the site just kinda died.

However, despite all that, I do feel it necessary to update this blog every now and then for the sake of whoever may read the blog- or at least as a sort of online diary.

Life Update

Since the last post, I've moved! I'm now living with one of my super close friends in Santa Clara. It a little cheaper than my previous listing, but I get a huge bedroom, walk-in closet, and in-house laundry. Definitely loving it here. I've also purchased an Alesis Strike Pro electronic drumset, so I've been able to play drums at home without disrupting people too much. It works as an amazing stress relief tool! Speaking of huge purchases, I'm also going to be buying/leasing my first car soon! Very excited to finally have a car that hasn't been run into the ground before I even bought it :). I'm also still playing competitive Smash Bros. on and off and will be attending the Genesis 5 tournament for both Melee and Smash4. Wish me luck!

Work Update

Work has been a great mixture of difficult and rewarding. Not only did I get a promotion in October to the next level of engineer, but I also just hit my 2-year mark at Apple since they count previous internships at the company towards my numbers! Really looking forward to what this year has in store.

Twitch Update

My Twitch stream has hit kind-of a rough point over the last few months. I thought my move would allow me to stream more often and that I'd have a better schedule, but I find myself doing more things with friends and my roommate instead of streaming. I'm thinking of disbanding the account altogether since I don't want to waste my time or my followers' time, but every time I do end up streaming, it kinda revitalizes my interest in it and I can't bring myself to quit. I'm gonna try to work something out going forward, and maybe let my roommate know that I just wanna chill and game a few days a week so he doesn't think I'm just ignoring him. Monday, Thursday, and a weekend day seem like a good mix while taking up less than half the nights that I'm home.

Anyway, that's about it for my update. Guess you'll hear from me in another year or so :P.

I've recently added a project I worked on to my Projects page called AvaJAM (you can play it here) that I worked on with the all-powerful Thomas. Well... we were selected as a winner AND mentioned on the GitHub Blog. Big thanks to those at GitHub who organized this, and Thomas for tugging the boat along and getting us the win!

So Global Game Jam 2015 happened this past weekend, and my team and I took first place with our Unity game, Sabotage. It was an amazingly fun experience. Not only did I get to work with some really good friends and see a ton of pretty cool games come to fruition, but I also got to learn a brand new language (C#) and framework (Unity) as well as compose some more music! (although one of the songs I'm not so proud of...)

Although Unity does port to web quite easily, we build the game to be played using Xbox controllers, and thus, don't have a readily available demo that I can tack onto my website. That will change soon hopefully! Big shout out to Thomas Steinke, Elliot Fiske, and Aaron Jacobs. Here's to another win next year!

So I've been working on a job application for Riot Games the past few weeks and actually have a phone interview with them on Monday! How exciting! Great thing that I lost my phone last week and don't have a replacement yet! :D ... :( [It's ok though, I have Wi-Fi calling on my new loaner phone]

Anyway, part of the application process required doing a programming test in which I created something I called the "Spellimobulator". You can see it here! BUT PLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THATS HOLY DO NOT USE IT JUST YET (as of 2015 its ok tho).

Why am I so adamant about this!? Well, Riot released a new champion called Kalista. She's a pretty awesome champion in the fact that her 'gimmick' consists of having an un-cancellable auto attack, but she can do a slight dodge-jump after each attack. It's really a cool concept, but of course seems quite difficult to master. Anywho, one of her abilities works interestingly in the fact that it gets a 0 second cooldown if you kill an enemy. My application would normally have a 'special case' function written for this ability to help better calculate its DPS. Of course, I haven't done that yet since school is conquering my life (thanks, 4000 word ethics paper). So, if I am calculating DPS by taking damage/cooldown, cooldown is marked as '0' in the API, and I stupidly do not have any try/except blocks to catch division by 0... then you can see what happens.

So Kalista did introduce a bug into my app, but it's good that she did. It's a pretty glaring bug. Any time you have division there should be either a 100% certainty you will never get a divisor of 0, OR you can just have something in place to handle the division by 0 when it happens. The text-based interface for Spellimobulator actually did have a try/catch block, but my web implementation does not. I'll definitely be fixing things before a certain company calls me on Monday, so expect it to be working by then. Geez thanks, Kalista

It's an odd feeling, but with over 300 games (thanks Steam family sharing) on PC, 20 on the Wii U, and 7 on my PS4, I still feel like I have nothing to play. I mean, sure there are a good amount of titles that I own that I've never launched, and even more that I've half-played and left unfinished, but why?

Time.

I just don't have the time to get invested in a nice, long, wonderfully made game. College really drains a person's life. Most days I'm going from 8am to 8pm at school either in class or doing some form of work. So what do I want to do when I get home? Relax, eat dinner, shower, and sleep. There really isn't enough time for me to meaningfully spend playing games like I could in high school, especially since games have been a big part of my life since I was in elementary school.

With all that said, I'm now starting to see why games like DOTA and League of Legends are so popular. They provide little 20-40 minute skirmishes that require no real investment into a storyline or control scheme. There's items, a few hero abilities, and a simple goal. I even find myself playing ARAM on LoL when I have a few minutes of free time just because its some good fun in a small time scale. Why don't I spend 20m on Wind Waker? Or Deus Ex? Or Wonderful 101? I could go on. My personal reason is because I want to really get the best experience possible by playing for as long as possible.

In short, I'm really excited for winter break to come so I can finally tear through some of my backlog, that is unless Smash for Wii U takes up my life...