Hey folks. Long time no talk. School's over for me, and the moonlighting profession has been taken up once more. However, I want to wind the clock back to the beginning of my previous quarter at UCLA, during which I enrolled in a class called "Game Development with the Oculus Rift." I couldn't refuse an opportunity to take such a class! In this blog post, I'm going to cover what it is like to take a class in game development, especially with virtual reality in mind, and how a class like this may benefit you or not.

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What makes Virtual Reality any different?

     At first, when we were all coming up with ideas for our games, a lot of them were rejected outright by our professor. The continuity needed in virtual reality requires a different kind of gameplay. There can be no cutscenes, no eye-blinking, no arm movement, no looking at oneself in mirrors—all these things can break the experience. This limited selection caused around eight of our fourteen teams to create horror games. Luckily, our team went a different route, really focusing on how the Oculus Rift allows

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     Here is the promised post-a detailed look at how my time at IndieCade went. I'll discuss what I did in great detail as well as outline my objectives and see if I managed to achieve them. Obligatory warning, it's 1700+ words, so make sure to read this while your code compiles or some similar long-winded process.

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Objectives

     I had three things I wanted to do while at IndieCade:

1. Meet as many game developers as possible.
2. Play as many games as possible.
3. Have as much fun as possible.

     These may seem like somewhat trivial objectives, but to someone who has just started down the indie road, these objectives are all very important. They would essentially guide me during IndieCade, and if I couldn't accomplish them, then it begs the question, would I be happy being an indie game developer now? After all, to make it in the indie world, you have to immerse yourself in it.

Day 1

     I got off the bus at 8:55 am and made my way to the production tent where all the volunteers checked in.

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