zak huber

At the beginning of the first semester of developing for Chico State Game Studios I was an ambitous young coder looking for some recognition. My first assignment was the creation of a custom damage class to drain life from a player periodically, so they would essentially bleed to death. This took a while to accomplish and I did so using a timer, something that opened countless windows for our game's pawn class in the future to come. Along with this I created a healing shrine and then was asked to create the Head's Up Display. This was sort of scary to me because the original person who was asked to do this simply quit and stopped showing up for meetings. Seeing as how this part of the game was completelty essential, I hit the task hard and came up with a solution as fast as I could. Because of my dedication and the amount of work I put in, our game had a working hud by the end of the first phase.

Following my first semester at Chico State Game Studios I was promoted to the role of Technical Director of Programming. I managed roughly 10 programmers for CSGS, most of which were older than myself. Due to the staggering amount of work I often found myself overworking and correcting the shortcomings of a few coders who simply wanted to stamp their names on the finished product. I handled all of the animation code, particle emitters, powerups, damagetypes and the Heads Up Display. Basically I was the one person who was really implementing the gameplay and all of the game's suttle nuances. A great deal of lessons in delegation were learned from this and I will never underestimate the value of a dedicated worker.