Digital Dave

*ring*

“We have the results from your test. At this time we’re going to continue searching for other candidates to fill this opportunity.”

I know I have a hell of a lot of passion, enthusiasm, determination, and leadership that I would have been able provide.  I definitely could have made an impact on their software suite.

The key to unlocking our potential is being persistent in life. Things do happen for a reason.

But hey, thanks for the birthday present! In all seriousness, it’s a pretty damn good company.  Considering that they could have just sent me an e-mail rejection, they actually called me.

Side note: Good luck Robert. E-mail me on how the interview went.

We started up a new semester, and my final, here at Kansas State University.  I love this school. Awesome atmosphere, people, faculty.  It’s hard to believe I’m nearly done.

My final semester.

• Creative Writing: Fiction
• Independent Project
• Game Programming Project
• Software Engineering Project

I debated on if I should stick with the game programming project, or to take a course in internet security.  Or even just adding it to my schedule.  But I decided to wait until graduate school.

And, finally, here is the CSS Builder.

Download Version 1 with Source

View a compiled output file

I included the source in the case you wanted to modify something. And you can view an example of what the output will look like. You can flag whether or not the header shows, or any of the comments. Some day I’ll wrap this thing up with a GUI, but until then I just wanted to get it out for those that wanted it.

Steps:

• Put the CSS files you want to merge inside the \DATA folder.
• EDIT project.csb
  • If you don’t want the header: set ‘headercomment’ to false
  • If you don’t want file comments: set ‘filecomments’ to false
  • Edit ‘buildfile’ if you want the output file somewhere else other than the default data folder
  • For each file, add the path and description
• Run Builder.exe, or set your development environment, to run with the parameter of the project file
  • Example: c:\builder.exe project.csb

Bye 25. It was nice spending a year with you…

Hellooooooo 26. Thanks for already making me feel old.

I just noticed I ended up getting a scholorship, again, for the 2008 school year.  One word… Awesome. This will help tremendously.

I’m going to start writing a little about my little adventure toward employment.  This includes each step through the process, introduction, face-to-face interview, etc.  I’m also doing this during the process so I don’t forget the details.

I found this company through the Career and Employment Center early on in the year while looking for a C++ position. But due to my dedication toward entering the game industry (applying to jobs, going to the game developers conference), I failed to actually meet this company at our career fair. Once I realized the extremely difficult nature of finding an internship in the game industry, I simply had to find something, game related or not. I did some research, enjoyed what I saw, and thought I could make an impact — so I passed on my information in an effort to get an internship.I was contacted and was on the verge of proceeding into an discussion when the position slipped right out from under me — somebody else got the position. Hard lesson learned, which is ultimately why I’m going after any company that I feel like I could make an impact this time. And as early as I can.

So I got back in touch with them last month and they gave me an opportunity to prove my worth. Today I drove out to Shawnee to complete an in-house exam. The first major barrier.

The place is phenomenal. Both the company and the area. I’ve never been to Shawnee, but I enjoyed what I saw. The few people I met at the company were extremely friendly, and the building has an extremely nice atmosphere. Heck, they also gave me a $10 gift card for Starbucks in return for taking their exam, which I promptly went across the street to get myself a nice Frappuccino with.

I still need to figure out who designed that building. I’m sure my girlfriend would appreciate what they’ve done with it as an Interior Designer.

So what do they do? Simply put, they built and continue to improve a document management system based on customer feedback. The system allows you to put documents in the system, link particular information between documents, and find/send documents with ease. This has turned out extremely well for them as they’ve grown a LOT recently. Apparently, they found a good niche and tackled it head first. We’re talking $5 million back in 2001 to a projected $67 million this year. They focus heavily on the customer while also putting great emphasize with taking care of their own employees… As they have a 98% staff retention rate… Not bad.

So how did the exam go? I was confident as hell taking it… But once I started the 3-hour drive back home I started to analyze things that I did… Yeah, a couple oops. Some were blatantly obvious, but that’s the love of a pencil and paper with no compiler to smack you in the face. And only one thing on the exam really tripped me up. I might discuss problems in a future post.

Overall, I highly recommend that you scout this place out if you’re looking for a good place to work in the Kansas area.

The first rule in iPhone development is apparently that you don’t talk about iPhone development.  It’s still ‘hush-hush’ in apple land when it comes to their fancy touch technology to the extent that they try to rip down anything that is put up. That is, if they find your stuff of course.

So, not only am I still getting used to using a Mac (dear God…), and Objective-C (God?), but I’m developing a rather simple game that I’ve made before in C++ back in the day, and adding some twists to it.  When I get some more progress on it, I’ll fill in the journal space.  I really hope to get this thing done by the 25th (school starts), but we’ll see.  I’ve decided to work on an iPhone game for my next semester independent project.  I have so many ideas on iPhone applications that it isn’t even funny.  The beautiful thing is that these things are all casual.  I love casual games.  I hope I can get some distance with this thing.  Independent game development FTW.  I deployed a test version of my game to the iPhone today (what a pain-in-the-ass process) and it blew my mind. Very cool.

I have a programming test with a company next week, so I’ll have to spend some time getting ready for it. It’s an in house programming test and I’m not looking forward to it at all… Well, I am… But I just fail pretty hard (depending on the structure) with exam-like conditions which makes this job hunt that much more interesting.  I wish I’ve been programming for 10+ years, but that just isn’t the case.

Speaking of the job hunt.

I’m starting to get denied from places out in California due to the distance between Kansas – California… It’s only 1,550 miles (I know, I’ve driven it in (almost) a day *yawn*). Anyway, I might have to move out there for a few months if things don’t look to be going my way.  Luckily, I know 2 people in San Diego, 1 in Burbank, and 1 other in long beach. I wish I knew somebody from the bay area… But that won’t stop me from camping out in a Hostel ($12 a night! Pfft.).  I want a job in California if you couldn’t tell.

If you’re a web developer and you find yourself dealing with a crap load of CSS files, you’ll probably find some use for this new application.  A buddy of mine fell in this pit, and needed a solution.  So, I opened up C# and whipped him up something.  It’s pretty simple.  It will build a CSS file from a bunch of other CSS files based on a build file.  It’s similar to JS Builder, which groups together java files.  It’s open source, and I’ll get a download to it soon.  If you need it now, find a way to contact me and I’ll hook you up.

Pending that things don’t continue to get in my way, I’ll be fiddling with developing iPhone applications. I got my hands on a Mac finally.

Dealing with interviews. Not the most exciting thing in the world.  Well… It really is, but I’m so massed in stress that I can’t really think of enjoying the opportunity to turn to a new page of my life. But reality is what it is… I suck at exam like interviews. Unless they’re more of an implementation project, but that’s rarely the case.

I blew past the 5 days that I wanted to take to complete this game, but considering the time spent on actually developing it (7 days), through all of the distractions, it still works for me. I’ve been traveling up to Kansas City (on my second trip now), and I spent a week playing phone tag with a company that contacted me for employment. I’ve got to say that it’s really nice that companies are coming after me, instead of just me applying to companies. Unfortunately, things didn’t work out with that interview, but things happen for a reason. It’s just nice that people are finding me, and from what I can tell, they are hitting my new portfolio site.

So, PyAdventure.

It’s an XML based adventure game. I wrote the maps that are composed of tiles. In the script, I run through the files and build objects from them. I don’t look for any files, except for the base file ‘DeathForest.xml’ in the source code. So you could build on, and on and on because the script loads the file you specify in the base file (yes, there is a performance hit, but we’re not dealing with huge maps. Nor do I have the desire to adventure around on a huge map). The code could easily be modified to enable you to initialize a file from a given settings document. You could change the structure of the XML files and write a new adventure game just by changing them. Or you could build a tool to do it for you.

Here is the structure of a tile.

Situation: What happens when I step on this tile?
Start: Does the player start on this tile?
Items: Item on the tile
Object: The ‘actionitem’ means that a player must have that item in order for this object to work. You can link this object to an NPC by specifying the ‘actionlink’ as the npc name.
Npc: Like the object, if an ‘actionitem’ is needed, it will not greet the user.

If you’re interested, feel free to download the game. Try it out, and provide me any critical bugs that you may have found. If you want a spoiler, just look in the map files.

Run PyAdventure.exe from the console for a better experience. Otherwise, the console will close on you when the game ends.

[Game] Download PyAdventure Game

[Source] Download PyAdventure Source Code

[Text File] View Spoiler