Women Who Code CONNECT 2016: Day 1 Recap – Danni

March 20, 2016

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Women Who Code CONNECT 2016: Day 1 Recap – Danni

10 Northeastern students from our ALIGN, Computer Science, and Bioinformatics graduate programs are attending Women Who Code’s Connect 2016 conference this weekend! From sessions on ‘Passing the Technical Interview’ to hands-on game development workshops,  CONNECT 2016 is a two-day conference designed to inspire women to excel in tech careers.

Check out the recap below from Day 1 of the conference.

Read Kaleigh’s recap here.
Read Hannah’s recap here.
Learn more about all 10 students who are attending here.

Day 1 = Hands on Game Development

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First day of the Women Who Code conference, I went to several interesting workshops. One of them was called “Hands-on game development with Scene Kit”. Nadia Yudina, who is an iOS game developer from the Barbarian Group, hosted it.

We had the opportunity to code along with Nadia in her workshop and have a hands-on and fun experience. We started with one of Nadia’s existing game projects – a Space Invader clone. During the workshop, she showed us step by step how to add different features to the game using Scene Kit.

Starting with creating a scene for the game, the speaker introduced the concept of a scene. It is like a container, which contains a root node, and the root node also has child nodes. Moreover, the speaker showed us how to use materials, creating geometry and add it to the node. Adding materials is a way for us to tell the appearance of the geometry.

One of the interesting parts was how materials can have different properties, and you get to choose different materials to give users different visualization. For example, there is diffuse map, which will add the color representation and there is normal map, which has the x, y, z coordinates, and shows us the directions of how lights are reflected and there is specular map etc.

During the workshop, the developer shares her steps of game coding procedures. They included “rendering the star”, “rendering the spaceship”, “creating nodes from 3D models, rendering the asteroids”, “Scenes Physics”. We got to see a blank white ball turn into a beautiful flaming star by adding shape, color, light textures, action and the Particle System to a node to create an amazing visualization.

It was a wonderful experience to watch the speaker demonstrate how she develops the 3D game project step by step. Playing video games is fun, but seeing how the game develops from scratch, was fascinating.

– Danni Li, Computer Science ALIGN

Northeastern University–Seattle is proud to support Women Who Code (WWCode) as a sponsor of Connect 2016.

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