Time Flies When You're Having (Project)Fun

Well that was a fast month. Sadly, I haven't found much time for playing with Flash due to work starting up. Yes, a job I do have, though it is only loosely in the field of video game production.

I work for DigiPen's ProjectFun Summer Workshops, where I teach C# programming to high school students. Each session lasts for two weeks. During the first week, I teach the students to use Visual Studio and a game engine (written by a DigiPen student of course) to make two games - a space shooter and a bit of an adventure/arena game. The second week, the student run the show, where they make a game of their own using what they learned from the previous week.

I suppose this sort of experience is right up the video game production lane, now that I really think about it. It's kind of like running a game company that's got two weeks to develop between 10 and 20 games, and all of the staff are practically new to programming. If any one of these games fail, I'll have a publisher (i.e. angry parent that paid the $1,000 for their child to attend) looking to place all of the blame on me. Luckily, I've shipped every title, even if we've had to make some major cuts in the end - though in previous years I was working with our in-house C++ based GUI SDK (which also pushed class sizes closer to 40).

My first session teaching C# went quite well, even without the TA I was supposed to have. We ended up with a few really solid games, and even our weakest title was pretty cool. Tomorrow's the start of my second run at teaching the C# engine, so it will hopefully go even better - even with our student count creeping quite a bit higher. I should actually have my TA this time, which will really help.

Wish me luck - I'm gonna need it when the network crashes because of all the students logging in at once.