Robot Math Attack!

Last week I took a wonderful 5-day professional education course at MIT titled "Game Development for Software Engineers". After years of playing (and criticizing) video games, I figured it was finally time to get off the bench and see exactly how tough this game development stuff really is. For a while now I've been dabbling with the Unity Game Engine for data visualization and to learn some basic game programming, and the purpose of this course was to teach the kinds of agile software development, rapid prototyping, and playtesting practices that make it possible to develop complex game systems that interact with even more complex users.

What I've Been Playing

Summers here in New England are a frantic time, wherein we attempt to compress 12 months of outdoor fun into 3  months of nice weather. (And of course by "nice" I mean, "oscillating between frigid, torrential rain and humid, 100+ degree heat".) I've never been to Old England, but I can only assume the weather there resembles that of a post-apocalyptic hellscape, because anything less and the British colonials never would have chosen to stay on this side of the Atlantic.

Amidst all the running, hiking, traveling, camping, drinking, working, and occasional parenting, I've hardly had any time to write about video games. Nevertheless, I did manage to play video games, because for some mysterious reason there's always enough time for that. Here are a few of my favorites from this summer. You'll notice most of them are PC games—summer console releases are sparse even when these systems aren't gasping their last breaths, so unless you're interested in playing an atrocity like Smurfs 2, let's hope you dropped some cash on the Steam summer sale.