October Slice is a Windows game I wrote for the October Experimental Gameplay Project. Every month they host a theme and give solo developers one week to complete a game from scratch based on that theme. I haven’t made a game in awhile, other than just messing around with stuff, so I thought it would be good to push myself to get something to completion. I used SDL and C++, my usual go to technologies. I had a bit of existing code from previous projects that I was able to re-use, but I had to rewrite a lot of base components, which definitely slowed down development but at least I have them for use in the future.
The game has no instructions built-in. I included them in a text-file, but I’ll also relay them here. When you start the game a song starts playing and you have 3:19 to maximize your score before time runs out or you destroy all the balls. Balls are “activated” by slicing across them with the mouse, or letting them fly over the cursor themselves. If a ball’s color matches the background color, then it is destroyed, your point multiplier increases by a factor of two (up to a max of 64), and you gain the number of points denoted by the multiplier. If the ball’s color doesn’t match, then it divides into two balls of that color, and your multiplier resets to 1. Finally, you can change the background color with the z(red), x(green), and c(blue) keys. Every time you do this your multiplier resets to 1. This creates a need to balance continually generating new balls so you don’t run out, and destroying balls of the background color to maximize point gain.
In regards to the second part of the title, I recently interviewed at Microsoft with Windows Phone Services for an SDE Intern position over the summer, having been a PM at Developer Engineering Solutions last summer. I was given an offer and accepted. If you have any questions regarding the interview process feel free to contact me. For the record, it’s not as hardcore or mystical as it’s been made out to be in the past, and shouldn’t require any preparation if you regularly develop software outside of school (assuming you are a student and that the software isn’t trivial). Just be comfortable enough with coding in some language that you could do it in your sleep, know your data structures and algorithms, be able to balance elegance and pragmatism, and know some basic optimization techniques.
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