Back to School

This coming Wednesday, I am going back to Stanford, not as a student but as a judge for the annual CS 248 (Introduction to Computer Graphics) Video Game Competition. This event has been run by Prof. Marc Levoy since 1999, and it is traditionally judged by industry professionals. In fact, in the inaugural year, a game Julie Chin and I submitted called GridRunner was selected as a Finalist by judges from EA. The project was a networked, multi-player light-cycles game, and the fun story about that one was that I had never actually tried a four-player game until I gave the demo for the competition. I had multi-boxed it, of course, just for sanity’s sake, but as we were a team of two, and the game was Unix-based, we didn’t have much time or reach for beta-testing. But it worked! Needless to say, I wouldn’t demo something like that nowadays. Here’s a pic for posterity; as you can see, graphics were never my strong point…

3 thoughts on “Back to School

  1. Ah yes, those were simpler times. Nowadays, programmer art is expected to be normal-mapped and bristling with particle effects. Okay, so I’m exaggerating a bit, but unfortunately not my much.

  2. I love how game job ads (over here in Australia at least) demand 3+ years commercial programming in C++ and another language, 3D Max or Avaya experience, plus level design experience in the 3D space.

    So they want a programmer who can make 3D art and 3d levels!

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