Hello World?

A generic title...in tribute to the only thing I know how to code right now! (In C++ at least. More on that below.) I've just ingeniously applied to a couple of super selective colleges for their computer science programs. With no programming experience of course - not completely zero, but I still can't code 20 lines to save my life. So as I'm waiting for my inevitable death sentence, here's my documented journey on becoming a functional programmer!

To be fair, the journey started a while back. I remember writing code in my in my first 2 years of secondary school, in those Computer Studies classes where everyone else was on Facebook aiming to be God of Tetris. As one of the rare few who sheepishly followed instructions, I clearly remember tapping my index thrice to close a triple quote, turning the whole paragraph green. And I definitely made a couple of 2D shapes in CodeBlocks. But those memories have turned hazy.

What I do remember well is attending a gamemaking course in Secondary 3. Thinking back, the course itself definitely wasn't worth the money - it didn't go beyond "Here, download this software and mess around with it!" - but that piece of software, to put it in a cliche, introduced me to a whole new world. There was this godly feeling in defining the laws for my character (Braid protagonist: Tim) to move around. I didn't get Best Game in the course, but when I went home I bought the Licensed Version straight away. Fast forward 4 years, and I've made a demo for the platformer I've always daydreamed about. The name's Little Green Soldier.

But as a retro-y pixel art game, LGS isn't the pinnacle of what I wanted to create. Pixel shading in 2D amounts to plenty of guesswork, while particle effects tend to look horrible unless you're a magician with pixels (but pixel smoke particles suck no matter which way you cut it). I wanted the whole thing in 3D. And I learned that to do this, I needed code - color text, black background code, not the ready-made button systems built for 2D stuff.

And of course, I also needed math. During the past 2 years I've been obsessively browsing Pixar's and Disney's publications, having fun gawking at all the code and calculus that I totally couldn't make sense of (and still can't). I'd always wanted to be an animator, but this stuff introduced me to the cool new prospect of being a Technical Director, ooh. I tried getting closer to the whole graphics scene by basing my senior math project on rainbows (and got some pretty nice discoveries - rainbows can form if diamonds rained underwater, wow!) - but with all math and no code, I knew I wasn't making real progress. After all, Pixar and Disney made it clear in their TD job requirements: "Strong programming skills including C++ and Python."

So that's where I am now. I'm 33% into Codecademy's course on Python, and Codeblocks is sitting in a new folder, freshly downloaded. No, the memories aren't flooding back from Computer Studies class - I'm relearning every piece of code letter by letter - but I'm going to make my way out of this. Onwards!

#learning #longpost #C #Python