EPTSo the story starts with my team and I of merely two people, doing pretty badly with our project. We recruited another student, and things from then on became better. The second semester rolls around just a few days ago, and I'm expecting to have a whole lot of work to do going into the semester. Honestly, too much work and too much playing catch-up from the previous semester. We needed some more developers, and needed them bad.
Then a particular DigiPen Professor, out of the blue, approached our team one evening. She asked if we needed more developers. She introduced us to two developers looking for a project to work on, and then proceeded to tell me one of them named Kim (of course, all koreans have the name Kim) was a Brood War professional in Korea for 5-6 years in the past.
Needless to say we recruited Kim without much of a question. Honestly even if Kim were the worst C++ developer in the world, I'd want him on our team; he doesn't necessarily have to write any code for me to be happy with meeting him. So now with my fan-boy status full blast, I ask him a little bit about Brood War. He told me, rather nonchalantly, that he played for Samsung KHAN for 6 years when he was around the age of 16 or 17. I asked him if he still plays at all for fun, his response was to be expected: He focuses on schoolwork now because if he plays any games it distracts him far too much from his studies. He then smiled and said "But don't worry I can still beat you
".He has no idea how good or bad I am at playing RTS games, but just because I'm white he has no doubt that I'd never win a game against him. And you know, I don't really doubt it either. When interviewing him briefly about C++ he would micro the Windows 7 desktop as if it were Brood War. Box all the things! He deleted some files in a folder we were working in with precision and speed. Hahaha...
All in all I'm extremely excited to work with the guy. He's taken a lot of advanced graphics courses and will be working solely on optimizing the current state of our graphics implementation, and thereafter implement any custom shaders that we all decide we'd like to see. This really is just too good to be true, as nobody on our three person team really had the time or desire to fix the current state of our graphics. Graphics is also one of the only areas in our C++ engine that is really isolated from the rest of the engine. There is a language barrier that gets in the way of clear communication, but as it currently stands he can work on graphics without affecting the rest of the engine implementation much at all. My team's producer is from another country, and english is her second language; she can communicate and understand what Kim is thinking a whole lot better than I can. This helps a whole lot during team meetings and talks. His English is actually really good, there's just a lot of complex concepts that come with C++ programming that cannot be communicated across the language barrier. It just sounds a little too good to be true.
And there's my story of how I "work" with an ex-Brood War professional player. I don't actually work in a paid position with him, but we are on the same year-long project, and that pretty much constitutes a near full-time position's worth of hours and work going from week to week.
He seemed a little private about exactly what player he was and I felt it was clear he wanted to focus on school. I don't know if he was an A or B teamer, but from the sounds of it he was an A teamer. I won't ask to one vs one him, and won't ask exactly what player he was, at least not until we're more familiar with each other. I don't really know how Korean culture works, so I really don't want to offend him by prying.
Once I figure out what player he was, I'll share all the exciting details in another blog. I'll probably also show off any cool visuals and shader effects he makes within our project too. Oh the suspense!
Till another time~~
!~
