Hey person hey,

I meant to do this update last week but I was just too tired. So here it is, a week late.

I decided to start taking courses at the Japanese Society. I'm going into the third week and I'm really enjoying myself. Unfortunately, the class is online (I would've preferred to go in person) but there's still lots of speaking for everyone to do. I'm getting much better at forming sentences on the fly and continuing conversations. It's hard to continue a conversation when it's just you. I'm now an advanced beginner so watch out world!

My data analysis course is going well. So the entire program is structured into two courses. The first course is Intro to Data Analytics. It only lasts 4 weeks so I'm heading into my last week. A lot of the stuff is things that I knew beforehand but I am learning some really interesting new things. When I'm done with this course, I'll have to 'perform a descriptive analysis of a video game data set'. This will be something that I'll be able to show during an interview. That's pretty cool, right? I'll show you what it looks like when I'm finished with it.

So last but not least, ALIEN INVASION! It took 9 different files, not including the READ ME, to create this game. Probably very few in the programming world, but that's a lot for me. I have a file for aliens, another for the main ship, and another for bullets. The start button even has it's own file. The scoreboard is another file because if it's on the screen, it deserves it's own file. Then there's the actually scoring, the game functions, the settings, and the file that runs everything. If you make a change in one file, you have to make a change in two or three other files. It was unlike anything I'd ever done before. I can't imagine how many files it would take to build a real game. At my last job, if something was changed in one location, it would need to be changed only once or twice. Which is crazy given the number of files we had. But enough of me groaning about it, you wanna see it right?

The premise of the game is probably very familiar to you. There's a ship at the bottom of the screen that you control. Your job is to shoot down all the aliens in the invasion. If you manage to do that, you move up to the next level which has a whole new fleet that moves even faster. Every level you progress, the faster the fleet and the more points you score. If one of the aliens crashes into your ship or lands on the bottom of the screen, you lose a ship. You get three ships total which are show on the top left hand part of the screen. If you run out of ships, game over. So I've put together a super shot clip of the game in motion. Due to my computer using a lot of energy recording and having a bunch of different applications up, the game moves super slowly. To keep you from getting bored, I've cut it down to about 20 seconds. The first 15 are how the game starts, and the last five are what happens when you finish off a fleet. Enjoy!



Till next time,
Cope.