Weekly Update

Burst! – The STEAM Expo in Great Falls was yesterday. Team KAIZEN edutained about 500 kids with the latest versions of Burst! and Shattered Soul and some VR demos. Before the Expo, I added a thumbs-up flag that uses Unity’s built-in cloth effect to Burst!’s adorable helicopter and worked together with my brother to add a new song to the game. I also added a system for loading and saving the player’s high scores and unlocked fireworks, colors, and songs, but none of it’s visible to the player yet, so it doesn’t really count. 😛 You can see the latest version of Burst! here, and if you want to help Team KAIZEN continue making games and teaching programming and game development, we’re currently entered into the FedEx Small Business Grant Contest. You can vote for us daily until April 4th here.

Other Programming Jobs – FirstGroup America asked me to update the PDF Splitter application I built for them this week. I may also be creating a simple website for them soon. Additionally, I had about eight job interviews, technical interviews, and phone screenings for three jobs since my last update. They covered the spectrum from the worst to the best job interview I’ve ever done. The last technical interview I did this week was so horrible that I pretty much immediately started a new web development project just to prove that I can do it. Also, if I’m going to build a website for FirstGroup America, I should probably practice first. 🙂 The website I’m building is a mix between Adventurous Reader and That’sNotAnArgument.com. It should be interesting and demonstrative, but we’ll see how far I get with it. It’s quite possible that Burst! or another job will take higher priority.

The Twelfth Hour – I’m back to being most of the way through Chapter 11. I can feel it getting closer to what I want it to be! So close! I think once I make it to the end of this speed write, I might go back to the beginning, rewrite the beginning per the critiques I received from Critters, and add in some details throughout that have become important to building up to the information revealed at the end before I start the heavy-duty editing of Chapter 8 and beyond.