Learn From Harvard

I have heard about universities offering free online classes. It seems Harvard is doing this as well. You can audit some of their classes for no cost. The most interesting one I have found is "Introduction to Game Development". It allegedly gets you coding in C# and Lua. You will use frameworks such as Unity and LOVE 2D.

I have not taken the course yet. But I bet it is probably pretty good if it is a Harvard course. Too bad I can't actually enroll in the class and say I went to Harvard. They do offer some sort of certification if you cough up $199 for it. I wonder if there is any way I could talk my employer into footing that bill. Probably not.

Word of Recall

I am down deep in the dungeon. Have fought some good battles. My inventory is chock full. Time to use my Word of Recall scroll to teleport up to town. Doh! I don't have any such scrolls. Weird. I usually carry at least 5 or 6 of them around minimum. What am I to do?

My initial reaction is to walk straight up to town through the stair cases. But that is going to take too long. I also have no food. Silly me. Okay. Maybe I can search around and find some items that will help me. I don't want to expend all my energy, get hungry, and die.

So I avoid battles with monsters. I also ignore most treasures that I might normally pick up. I start discarding some of the valuable items I am carrying. I find a rod of detecting doors/stairs. But it does not recharge quick enough to find all the stairs I need.

Eventually I find some food. And then some more. The immediate danger is over. I find a lot of scrolls that I have not identified. I wonder if one of them is a Word of Recall. I don't have identify spells to spare. At long last I find a rod, and once identified, determine that is a Rod of Recall. I am saved!

Ethereal Legends

I hang out lurking on the gamedev subreddit. Saw a post today from an aspiring gave developer looking to work for a AAA gaming company. He is an older gent. Works in the IT industry. Been trying to get a game dev job for six years. No luck yet.

The exceptional thing about this guy is that he created his own company and developed a game. Tried to do that to beef up his resume. The game is a 3D world made with the help of Unity. It is called Ethereal Legends. Check out a review of the game on YouTube.

You know it is a tough transfer from IT to gaming if this guy cannot make the jump. He has already shipped a title on Steam. I guess you got to go straight into game dev right from college. Hope you got good grades, some internships, and a bunch of side projects to impress the gaming companies.

Checkers Jump and Capture

I am back to working on my checkers program. Added the capability for the player to jump over and capture the computer pieces. The computer cannot jump over the player pieces yet. And there is no double jump. But all of those are coming soon.


Eventually I will need the ability to promote pieces to kings for both sides. However right now I am focusing on baby steps. It is working out pretty good. Just doing some game logic. Not learning a whole lot of C++. But hey. Any programming is good practice.

Moving to the Checkers App

Originally I started writing a chess app to practice some C++ programming. The movement of the pieces were tricky. So I decided to work on the simpler checkers game. Having drawn the board, I am now drawing game pieces on the board.


I can respond to the player choosing a piece. The selected piece gets highlighted on the screen. Also can have the player click on the location where the piece should be moved to. Implementing simple checkers movement rules (no jumping opponent pieces yet).


Now that the player can move, time for the computer to do the same. Originally I thought I would generate a list of all possible moves and rank them. But for now I just have the computer choose the first available move.


These limitations lead to a pretty boring checkers game. I guess it is time to implement jumping/capturing opponent pieces. After that, I must implement piece promotion to kings. One thing at a time though.