Sean Ho, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of Computing Systems and Informatics/Mathematics.
Role: Executive Producer
Sean's a child of God, an ordinary guy saved by Jesus' extraordinary grace. That's the most important fact to know. He's also a self-described computer geek and gadget freak, but that's less important. He grew up in Seattle, WA as the youngest of four children, and now teaches computing science and mathematics at Trinity Western University in Langley, BC. He recently got married and is insanely lovey-dovey with his sweetie wifey. In his spare time, he enjoys taking naps and jamming on the acoustic guitar.
Recent Blog Entries
Happy Hum
As former U.S. Secretary of Defense Don Rumsfeld famously noted, there are "known knowns" (things we know), and there are "known unknowns" (things we know we don't know), but what really will get us are the "unknown unknowns" – the ones we don't know we don't know!
This time around for the game project, we had the foresight to start planning and preparation work back in Fall semester with the team leads -- we even had a tiny prototype of one of the minigames done by the start of December! But once the Spring semester started and we got into production in full force, the "unknown unknowns" kept coming up. I think for the programming team a big challenge early on was figuring out what we need to do -- we had a good design document, we had a rough idea of the concepts of each minigame, but getting down to the implementation is not so easy. We are essentially crafting a game engine from scratch -- PyGame is a great foundation, and we found a cool physics engine in PyMunk, but there's so much more to code.
Those were the growing pains in the early phases of production, but now as we approach our alpha release, I really feel like we've settled into a rhythm! Every class time is filled with "happy hum" -- a programmer asks an artist to resize a background image; a team of game designers disagree and work out game play; and every now and again, a shout of rejoicing erupts when code works well!
There are still a lot of known unknowns ahead of us; as we approach alpha the next step is to buckle down on testing and tuning -- and undoubtedly, we'll still have a lot of implementation to finish after alpha. But the gears are turning, more of the unknowns are becoming known, and production is humming!