Summer Camps

This week I both finished working at the MSU game design summer camps and hit level 80 in World of Warcraft. I think I'll talk about the camps and save WoW for another day. So the camps were pretty awesome and pretty exhausting at the same time. I worked as an instructor during the day and as a camp councilor in the evening. I have to say that the 2nd week went over a lot better than the first, mostly because those meddling music production campers couldn't keep themselves out of trouble during the first week.

As far as the games students are concerned, I was usually more impressed with their efforts in paper prototyping and brainstorming than their attempt at a digital game. Every group had at least 1 person that reverted back to youtube videos and playing flash games instead of working on the project. We also had one kid try to set up networking for his game, although he didn't head my warnings that we would limit the amount of help we'd give to him (we didn't want to get sucked in) and he also didn't actually want to look up what code does. He was more in the category of dragging scripts onto objects based off of their name as opposed to what the contents of the script actually were. That habit gets a developer no cookies. However, I believe a few of the builds featured the other player flickering, which means he got half-way to a working state (which is farther than I originally thought he'd make it). I think he managed to get it so that RPC calls were recognized, but state based calls weren't, so the game would only receive information if a player was performing an action such as jumping. Then again, I don't know that much about networking...