So it’s been… over a month since my last post. Yeek. Sorry. There’s a reason for my absence… I just started a new job, and it’s been keeping me very busy. Before the pandemic, I was working as a studio teacher—I worked with kids on film sets. But then COVID-19 happened, and all film production shut down, and while it eventually start up again, it wasn’t at the same levels as before… and I wasn’t sure how soon it was going to be up to a level where I was actually making enough to live on again. So I reluctantly got a classroom teaching job, for the sake of having enough of an income to get by. But it’s been taking up all my time, the more so since I started after the semester had already begun and so I had a lot of catching up to do, and there’s this whole new software system the district uses (Schoology) that I was unfamiliar with and had to learn. (Oh… and in case you’re wondering, yes, the school district where I teach is doing remote learning, so all the classes are taught over Zoom. But that doesn’t make the prep time or grading any less time consuming.) So, unfortunately, for the last month I haven’t had significant time to devote to working on games or going through the Unity Learn material. And I can’t really participate in most of the Unity Learn Live courses, since they’re mostly in the morning at a time I’m teaching class. I guess one upside of having this job (besides having money, which admittedly is a pretty big upside) is that as an educator I now qualify for free access to Autodesk products for at least a year, so I can start learning and using Maya (as a studio teacher I was already an educator, of course, but since I didn’t work at a qualified educational institution that didn’t count)… but I haven’t had time to get into that either. So, unfortunately, I just haven’t had anything to post about—and haven’t really had time to write the posts even if I had,
But I’ve definitely been wanting to get back to it, and this weekend is the perfect excuse opportunity to do so… the Unity Create with Code Game Jam. Yeah, I’m still very busy, and yeah, I should be spending this weekend grading the exams that all my classes just took… but what the hey; I don’t want to miss this, and I can afford to take a little time off from school (heck, from a psychological standpoint maybe I can’t afford not to).
Alas, I wasn’t able to watch the Kickoff live session, because I was in class at the time. Or… well, I shouldn’t have been able to watch the Kickoff live session, but given that my class that period was taking an exam I figured that after the students had gotten started on the exam I could mute myself on Zoom and keep an eye on the Zoom chat to answer any student questions while watching the kickoff video on another laptop, so… I did manage to catch the last twenty or thirty minutes. And I see the recording of the live session is online now, so I can catch up on what I missed… in fact, I’m probably going to go ahead and do that right after I post this, uh, post.
So… that’s what I’ve been doing for the last month, and that’s what I’m going to be doing for the next few days. I’ll make another post after the Create with Code Game Jam is over… and I hopefully won’t go this long without a post here again in the future.
Now I just have to figure out what my game will be about… The theme is “Secrets”, and I’ve sort of considered a few ideas, but haven’t settled on one yet, and I really need to do that soon, because I need to start working on the game. Let’s see… secrets… secrets… hmm…
