Day 129: Today, it’s not friday… I wish it was though. But no, it’s Thursday. I still don’t have much to say about what I did today. I’m afraid it’s going to be like that every day until the end of the content sprint…

Daily interesting stuff:

• Reddit post, Why don’t game use mesh perfect collisions ?. Because it’s slow. And most of the time, useless.

• Reddit post, employee of crytek telling the current payment problems. The whole story seems outrageous. It’s a bad time for crytek.

• “The best technical interview ever”. It’s just a critic of the common “whiteboard questions”. But it raises some good points.

Tasks done:

• Did 35 new rooms. Or is it 34? I don’t really now. But more importantly now, I don’t have to make any more rooms. I have 175 unique rooms right now. I think that’s a good pool to make a diversified dungeon. Now comes another boring part, putting enemies in the rooms. That’s going to be a long and tedious process as well. But no matter what, I need to do it, as it’s the core of the player experience. If there’s nothing to shoot in a SHMUP, it’s not really a SHMUP. Anyway, back on the rooms I had some weird problems due to the tileset path being wrong sometimes. Oh and for most of the rooms of today and yesterday, I didn’t made a sketch before. I just opened Tiled and rolled with it. I’m not 100% satisfied with the quality of the rooms, but it should do the trick. Let’s see, what else can I say, to persuade myself that I didn’t waste my time? Nope I don’t know what to add. Let’s stop here.

• Looked at some interview questions. I stumbled upon an article that was a big rant against white board technical question. It was more a collection of tweet than an article, but it was still interesting. I have mixed feelings on this. I don’t know what to think. I’m sure I think whiteboard question are pretty much useless but I’m clueless about the big picture. Is it really important to know how to balance a binary tree? Hell I never even used a binary tree. I have trouble with all these “theoretical” things. It sometimes feels like the only reason it’s deemed important is because it’s taught in CS and so people should know it. From the unformed opinion I have on the subject I think we’re leaning toward a period where knowing how to use tools is more important than knowing how these tools work. I’m pretty sure of what I think makes a good programmers though. A good programmers is someone that solves problems, and solves them fast and well. That’s it. Oh yeast and if I looked at that, it’s because I got a phone interview with Ubisoft yesterday. It didn’t go terribly well. It’s wasn’t technical at all, but I was too damn stressed. It was enraging to know that my body reaction was both illogical and unproductive, and that I couldn’t control it.