18 5 / 2011
End of the Year
As of Friday, my sophomore year at Brown is officially over. Finals period wasn’t too bad this year, as I was only taking three classes, two of which were CS classes without exams. I limited myself to three because I got five course credits last semester (thanks to an extra TA-ing credit) and could thus afford to make a little more time for frisbee. Speaking of, BMo finished up the season a few weeks ago, losing to Midd and Vermont at regionals. But despite our lackluster finish, I personally felt good about my development as a player over the season, and definitely enjoyed balling with my teammates for a couple months.
The big news from the last few days, other than being half way through college (aargh!), is the release of Ballsy, the final project for one of my CS classes. It’s a 2D puzzle platformer in which the player must navigate a beachball through tricky levels using a grappling hook, and it also sports a fully featured level editor. My team of four poured many hours of design and coding into the project, ultimately surpassing 8,000 lines of code (the largest software project I’ve worked on). We wrote it using Java, with Processing for graphics and a port of the Box2D engine for physics. Since putting it up yesterday evening, we’ve gotten over 180 downloads and over 700 recorded runs of the game, which is super exciting. We plan to continue development over the summer and into the future, at least expanding the built in level set. Check it out: http://www.beballsy.com!
I’ve written all of this with the iPhone Tumblr app, and by this point I really wish it had a sideways keyboard option. Beyond that, it’s pretty nice.
