Caffeine, Cops, and C++

Familia,

   What a week this has been. Things are getting quite busy though not quite as soul-crushingly overwhelming as I was expecting. This week I donned on me that one of the reason that school is so hard here is because the semesters are shorter but the amount of material per semester is comparable. I think semesters are 4 weeks shorter than the standard at BYU-I and I've heard many times that semester credits are harder / more valued than quarter credits. I have one full week of classes and then a partial week for finals ahead. Over the remainder of that week of finals, and the one week break, I will join two of my roommates (well, technically they were last semester but they are pretty much still considered roommates) in Boise. It sounds like I'll have a room all to myself while I am there and a ride both ways- which is always nice. This week has been very strange but especially the weekend. For now, I'll just get into it.

Burial Mound Pizza

Triangle Pizza

FHE (Family Home Evening)

   This week's Monday night activity was to make home-made pizzas. We met up at the church and split up into 3 groups. We were handed a bag of supplies and assigned a house where we went to create a unique pizza to share with the group. The rules were, no circle, square, or rectangle pizzas. The most unique pizza wins. Well, the ending designs were definitely unique. One group made a pizza that was stretched at the corners and I was told that it was a bear-skin rug. The other group made a triangular pizza that resembled a calsone. Our group won though : )

   The process of choosing a pizza design was a bit haphazard but we went from a triangle pizza shaped like the tri-force (See Zelda Games), to a sphere pizza with two halves put together, to covering a bread pan with the dough. Our plan was to put the toppings into the dough but we ended up just covering the dough and cutting some slits into the sides to stuff ingredients into the pizza. Well, honestly we didn't know what to call it but someone said it looked like a burial mound so we added a noodle with R.I.P. written on it before presenting our pizza for the vote. The best part was just spending time, in a big group, in a friend's home but the pizza designing seemed to be a good way to get us together.

Triforce

C++

   A large portion of this week (nearly 30 hours) has been invested in the final project for my CS165 class. I finished the minimum requirements for the project after about 12 hours but I had made a list of features that I thought would enhance the game as well. My teacher was offering up to 20% extra credit on this project and I was at the point in the project where most things I added made the game more fun to play so I got a bit addicted to the project. My roommate Evan was gracious enough to play my game and let me record him so that I could show the family how it works. I'll include some links to videos that show my game when they are fully uploaded and sharable. In the meantime, here are some lists to add context:

Requirements:

Draw a ship that moves and fire bullets
Draw asteroids that begin at the edge of the screen and wrap around the screen when they reach an edge.
Allow collisions to occur between different types of objects (bullets break asteroids, asteroids break your ship, bullets break your ship)
Cause large asteroids to become smaller asteroids when they are destroyed.
Keep creating more asteroids.

(That's the gist of what was required but I added these and more)

Add-Ons

Create a level system, move to the next level when asteroids are gone
The number of lives, score, etc. are displayed between rounds.
The player has multiple lives, restarts in the middle when they die, is temporarily invulnerable when they respawn, and the number of lives left is displayed when a player dies.
A game over screen with the final score is displayed when lives run out
When the player respawns, a shield is drawn around them to show they can't be hurt
Upgraded weapons were added with the ability to cycle through them
An intro screen was added and the gameplay is demoed for you
-I later added the upgraded weapons to this demo

[Video of gameplay Intro / Demo]

[Video of Roommate gameplay]

*I tried trimming this video but Youtube took several hours before I gave up on a link to the trimmed version. Feel free to skip around to see how the game plays.

Student Ambassadors (Final Week)

    It was a bittersweet occasion on Tuesday night but the end had to come. The last night of our Student Ambassador volunteer service was this week. I spent about half of the time making last minute calls so that we could reach out to all of our contacts. At the end we spent about half an hour enjoying some food and joking around. I wasn't feeling too well that night but it was nice to just relax and talk for a bit after all was said and done. Naturally, on our last day, the group wanted to take some pictures so we have the humorous picture here as well as the more serious one.

Letter from Miranda

   There's not a lot to say here but I did receive my first letter from Miranda since December. We do still Email every week so I don't feel behind on her mission life but it is always nice to receive something more tangible. There are definitely ups and downs in the mission field and she has had to deal with some of that but she seems to have taken on a new perspective about some things and to be doing quite well toward the end of the letter (the letter had several entries spanning, from what I could tell, a few weeks). She has been serving in Berryville, Arkansas since early February and it seems to be a growing experience for her so far- though not an especially easy one at times.

A Very Odd Friday

   Now for the part of the headline that you are probably wondering about the most. Friday night was an odd one for several reasons. We had a few guests over and ended up watching Taken until after midnight. There was a call for another movie and we started watching The Ring which lasted into the early AM. At some point during the movies, two of my roommates returned from an evening where they had gone, with a few girls, to a cemetery. They found an app for their phone that supposedly detects ghosts. I just shake my head when I hear them talking about it but I think they do it just to creep people out. In any case, they returned and offered a milkshake up to anyone who wanted some. My old roommate Jeffrey and I split the shake and neither of us finished our half. I'd say I finished about a quarter of what we were given. The milkshake was not very good... Flash forward a couple hours later and this roommate (Evan), Jeffrey, and I were up talking and joking around until about 5 AM. I remarked several times how I hand't been up until 5 AM for a long time and was surprised at how awake I felt.

   I came to find out that the milkshake tasted awful because it was a mix of leftovers from a few milkshakes that the group had bought. Not only that, but I also found out that one of the girls in the group had put some caffeine pills into the milkshake. I'm not sure she had a specific intent in doing so and was just doing something pointless out of boredom. In any case, I ended up unintentionally buzzed by the caffeine and didn't head to bed until after 5 AM. Not only that, but I only slept for about 4 hours once I finally did get to sleep. When we ended our chat, and I finally was getting into bed, I heard a very loud and deliberate knock at our door. I waited to see if I heard things correctly, and also to hear my roommates open the door... which they didn't.

   I left my room to answer the door to find two police officers standing there. They asked if Jacob Maughan was here (my roommate) and I told them that he was asleep upstairs. They said something to the effect that we probably were asleep too. It took about 30-40 minutes for us to find out what was going on but it boiled down to a concerned mother calling for the police to check on her son. He takes some medication for depression and she had been trying to reach him throughout the night but he never received the calls or returned her calls. Jake has been feeling some anxiety about heading back home to Michigan at the end of the Semester and has been having a bit of a hard time lately but the little visit that we had from the police seemed like a bit of overkill. It was about 6:00 when I did finally lay down to bed again but I did only sleep until about 10:00-10:30 before getting up and remaining fairly alert and awake until about 2 AM when I called it quits on my project for the day.

   Saturday was mostly spent programming at the house but we also made a trip to DI to pick up a TV stand. My roommate had decided that he wanted something we could watch with the lights on so he bought a 55" TV for the living room. On our trip outdoors, it was quite windy and one of my roommates was able to ride on the TV stand (it was on wheels) in the parking lot because the wind was so strong. There were actually some warnings about traveling in the wind because dust clouds can obscure visibility. It was a bit strange but I could definitely see the intensity of the wind causing issues with dry dust.