This is the totally optional, don't watch it if you don't want to,

meet the instructor lecture.

I'm Tim, Dr. T Chamillard, and

I grew up in a small town in southeastern Massachusetts named Norton.

And after high school, I went off to Georgia Tech to pursue a Bachelors

in Electrical Engineering degree, but I was only at Georgia Tech for a year.

So if you'd like, pause the video and guess for

why I only stayed for a year, and then continue.

As one of my past students said, I left for the love of a good woman.

So my girlfriend was in Massachusetts, Georgia Tech is in Atlanta, Georgia,

and that was too far for me.

So I spent about a year and a half putting stuff into boxes and

handing it to the UPS guy.

And then, I enlisted in the US Air Force,

went off to basic training, went to technical training school, and

after about four months in the Air Force, I got married.

So, pause the lecture again if you'd like to decide whether that was the same

girl I left Georgia Tech for or somebody else.

The answer is it is in fact the same woman, and we are still married.

So here we are in the Air Force.

We went off to Omaha, Nebraska for our first tour.

And then after 16 months the Air Force decided to send me to school full time

to pursue a Bachelor's Degree in Electrical Engineering at Georgia Tech.

So I did get to finish that degree at Georgia Tech in Electrical Engineering,

and then I went off to officer training school and

got my commission as an Air Force officer.

Our first assignment in the Air Force was at Los Angeles Air Force Base

where I spent four years managing contractors writing software to help us

fly a satellite.

Particularly, orbital software was my general area of expertise.

We had our first two children, both boys, while we were in Los Angeles, and

I also pursued my Master's Degree in Computer Engineering at

the University of Southern California, going to school nights.

Finished that tour after four years and went off to the US Air Force Academy

where I taught undergraduate computer science courses for two years.

Now, the Air Force Academy is usually a four year tour, but

I only spent two years there.

So if you'd like to pause the lecture video again and

try to guess why I only spent two years, go ahead and do so.

The answer is, the Air Force decided to send me off to

UMass Amherst to pursue a doctorate.

So I am, in fact, a doctor of computer science.

So I don't actually help people.

And my entire family loved the part in Treasure Planet,

the movie, where there's a non-medical doctor and he is trying

to help somebody who is injured and he says, I just sit here and I'm useless.

And I saw that movie with my entire family at the movie theater, and

at that line, every single person leaned over and looked at me.

So everyone knows I'm a doctor, just not a real doctor.

Okay, so I finished off that degree and went back to the Air Force Academy for

that full four year tour that I should have had in the first place.

And then my final assignment was to Washington,

DC where I spent a couple of years managing contractors developing

Web applications and the databases that support those applications.

And then, I retired from the Air Force.

So, I've been at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs since 2003,

and I've taught a variety of courses including graduate level software

engineering courses, undergraduate computer science courses, and

undergraduate game design and

development courses, all of which I created from scratch.

And in fact, we now have a Bachelor of Innovation in Game Design and

Development, and I teach many of the beginning and the final course

in that particular program and I'm the program director for that program.

So, at this point, I exclusively teach game development courses.

I also spent five and a half years as an indie game developer

in a company that I formed with my two sons, and that's Peak Game Studios.

And we did a number of games both on speculation and on contract.

Here are the games we built on speculation.

The two images on the left are a game called Khet

that's based on an actual board game.

So we've got the license from the board game manufacturer.

And you can think of this as chess with lasers.

And you can actually download a free version of this game at this point

from the Burning Teddy website.

I'll talk about Burning Teddy soon.

The other screenshot from the upper right is for

a game that we didn't quite finish as we

shut down the company once my sons sort of grew up and moved on to do other things.

And that game is called Battle Paddles ,and you should think of this as pong

with weapons because that's sort of the big idea behind that game.

We didn't quite finish it, but we'll get back to that game as well.

So on this slide are the games that we built under contract.

So as a company, we went, we got a contract to build some games and

we actually got paid to build them and that was awesome.

So the two on the left are for educational games for eighth graders.

The one all the way to the left was a set of four mini games to teach about physics,

and the title of that group of mini games was Physics With Neat Details,

and if you think of the acronym for that, it's PWND.

And so of course,

you know a little tongue-in-cheek of game development, of course.

And the lower one was to teach eighth graders about robotics.

So they would configure a robot with various attachments to go complete

a number of missions.

Again, there were a few mini games to do.

The upper right one is something called Colorado History Arcade.

We got a contract to teach fourth graders about Colorado history, and

that game was deployed on the Pikes Peak library district website.

So all of the games we built as a company, except for

the Colorado History arcade game, where using C#,

we happened to use XNA Game Studio to do that, but

now of course we've moved on to Unity.

The company hasn't, but I have.

And so that brings us to this next slide where I tell you I now have

a small company, and by small I mean just me, called Burning Teddy.

And I use that company to publish textbooks and online courses, and

of course, also to do good game development.

So that Battle Paddles game that I showed you the screenshot from,

I am in the process of porting that over from XNA Game Studio to Unity.

That is about 60,000 lines of code, so it's going to take a little while to port,

but at some point, that will be on the Burning Teddy website, burningteddy.com.

And I'm also working on another smaller casual game

that's called Balloons Extreme and I'll actually post

my progress on burningteddy.com as I build that game in Unity.

So Burning Teddy, all the game development I'm doing, is actually in Unity.

So when I'm not teaching and I'm not doing game development, what am I doing?

Well, a number of different things, but one of those things is cycling.

So riding a bike is one of my joys in life, I guess.

So these are my three bikes.

The blue one is the oldest one and that's really an old bike at this point,

but I used it to really get into cycling.

Not racing so much, but doing long rides like a number of centuries,

which are hundred mile bike rides, including at the time,

one of the ten toughest centuries in the United States.

And so that century had over 10,000 feet of climbing.

That's what makes 100 mile bike ride harder than another, is elevation gain.

And so I did a number of bike rides.

The mountain bike, the one on the bottom,

is a result of going mountain biking with some friends one day, and

I loved it so much that I went out and bought the mountain bike the next day.

The bike all the way on the right is my triathlon bike.

So being a cyclist, I did a lot of long rides.

I also did a bunch of running, including a number of marathons and a running

race that goes from the bottom to the top of Pike's Peak here in Colorado Springs.

I did that running race multiple times.

And once you've biked a long time and run a long time,

you say well, you might as well do some triathlons as well.

Just add a swim and you'll be fine.

And so I've done a variety of triathlons, all the way from sprint distance,

which are really short, all the way up to an Ironman distance race.

So I've done a range of triathlons as well.

Really, the other thing, other than interesting like reading books and

stuff like that, the other leisure thing I do is I play video games.

That should come as no surprise to you.

And so, the question is, what kind of video games do I play.

And you should pause the video, guess in your mind what those might be, and

then you can move on to see a screenshot of what I use to play my video games,

and as you can see, racing games are my passion.

So, really racing simulations,

so realistic racing games rather than arcadey racing games.

And if you're interested in all the details of that racing rig,

you can go to the PDF that I've provided as a resource for

this lecture, and you can read all the details about it.

So there you have it.

None of this has anything to do with course content, but

it gives you a little more insight into who's teaching you in the course.

Meet the Instructor (optional)

Introduction to C# Programming and Unity

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