Spring 2009 Postmortem

5 days since term ended, and I think I’m finally over the trauma enough to write about it

CMS.610:

This class was my Media Industries and Texts class. We spent the term making a game and a sales pitch to go with it. I mentioned it a few times here, I think, I mean, that implies that you read this, which implies that you must have nothing better to do. seriously. Now that I think about it, this is going to be a really boring post, you should probably just go watch TV or something.

I’m getting off topic. Which is a convienent headway into mention of the prof of the class, who was really cool. He started Bethesda!  Cool, right? Anyways, I mention the off topic thing cos of his great stories, which somehow always were connected to the subject at hand. And they all were also related to each other somehow. They were all connected in some crazy way.

The class project, the game, it was at the same time my favorite thing I was working on all term, and the bane of my existence. I was the head and only programmer, and I am not a very good programmer. So in the end, our game was pretty ugly. It was a pretty… questionable premise to start, fighting with the purpose of losing, which is funny, and probably why it got picked in the first place, but too counter-intuitive, which is a lot easier to see in retrospect, I guess.

Here’s the commercial that was made for the game in question

All the judges voted for the other game, and I can’t blame them, their game was really cool.

4.341:

Photography. Photography is a lot of fun. Photography class, is bullshit. The teacher, was a total turd all term. The final review, she didnt’ say a single nice thing about my project. The judges said a LOT of nice things, she said none. I am not looking forward to my grade, as I have a feeling I’m going to have to argue it higher. Or something. I have never done so before. But I worked really god damn hard on it. OH, and she’s the head of the Visual Arts concentration department, so I’m going to have to continue dealing with it, I guess. Bah. I’ll post photos from my final set on my next post later.

21L.011

The Film Experience: This was a good class. Not bad, not incredible, just interesting. It’s Henry Jenkin’s last term here, and I really wanted to take one of his classes, and this fit the bill.

CMS.600

Casual Games & Casual Players: We played games every Monday! Besides that, we talked about various aspects of the casual gaming industry, including players, developers, and other stuff. It was cool, but nothing particularly amusing or terrible happened.