Webdev, Games, Isolation, Insomnia
Current status: alone on campus, ate my second self-cooked college meal (consisted of burnt sausages and crispy spaghetti), mildly shell-shocked from playing a really great game.
Undertale. It's a masterpiece. I've never seen a game, a one-man indie game no less, have such thorough programming. It's an exercise in psychology, predicting every step of your thoughts and actions inside and outside of the game context, even when you save and reload, or heck, restart the entire save file. Undertale feels like a complete reimagination of games as a medium, subverting all sorts of traditional tropes like having the integrity to wipe out all previous save file data, but in retrospect it's more like the epitome of gaming rather than the exception. Games are by definition about interaction, engagement, a cross between film and psychology. A game that can read your mind and respond according to every possible move you can take is really the ultimate game there is, and as far as I can see, Undertale fulfills that criterion.
And my lord, the music. It's absolutely incredible. Toby Fox you are a legend.
Unfortunately you're also a piece of crap for making the scariest thing I have ever laid eyes on, and that's the game's final boss. I don't want to spoil anything on the off chance that some random wanderer reads this in the future, but hey, if you're there -- don't look it up. I was never prone to being scared before, but this thing takes the honor. Holy mother of demonic. Currently also considering whether to embark on the Genocide Route, I'm still trying to muster the guts to do it. I hate the idea of permanence in video games. Hey, maybe this should be my research topic for Intro to Interactive Entertainment next semester.
Anyway! Webdev.
It feels good to start at square one again in learning stuff. Recently cleared the Codecademy courses on HTML-CSS and Git, and skimmed over a crappy one on deploying a website using some weird thing called Jekyll, whatever that is. Also developed the front page of my portfolio site -- full version coming soon!
Now at 31% in the JavaScript course. I once couldn't fathom why professional coders would say that "languages don't matter", and that "computer science isn't about programming", but it's all starting to sink in. CS is really the science of problem-solving, not just in finding solutions but also in determining the most efficient ones. Core concepts like if/else, for/while loops, arrays and functions are basically omnipresent across all languages, and the difference from one language to another really lies in niche functionalities, like JavaScript's web interactivity and C++'s memory management.
