This is the totally optional, don't watch it if you don't want to meet the instructor lecture. I'm Tim, Dr. T Shamilat. I grew up in a small town in Southeastern Massachusetts named Norton. 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. 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. My girlfriend was in Massachusetts, Georgia Tech is in Atlanta, Georgia, and that was too far for me. 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. 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. 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. 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 as the Air Force was that Los Angeles Air Force Base, where I spent four years managing contractors, writing software to help us fly satellites, particularly orbital software was my general area of expertise. We had our first two children, both boys, while we were in Los Angeles. I also pursued my master's degree in Computer Engineering at the University of Southern California, going to school night. 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. 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. I am in fact a doctor of computer science, so I don't actually help people. 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's injured, and he says, "I just sit here and I'm useless." 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. Everyone knows I'm a doctor, just not a real doctor. 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. 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 web applications. Then I retired from the Air Force. 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. 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. At this point, I exclusively teach game development courses. I also spent a year and a half as an indie game developer in a company that I formed with my two sons, and that's Peak Game Studios. 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 got the license from the board game manufacturer, and you can think of this as chess with lasers. 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 game that we didn't quite finish as we shut down the company once my sons grew up and moved on to do other things. That game is called Battle Paddles, and you should think of this as pong with weapons, because that's the big idea behind that game. We didn't quite finish it, but we'll get back to that game as well. On this slide are the games that we built under contract. As a company, we went and we got a contract to build some games and we actually got paid to build them and that was awesome. The two on the left are for educational games for eighth graders. The one all the way to the left, it was a set of four mini games to teach about physics, and the title of that group of many games was Physics with neat details. If you think of the acronym for that, It's Poland. Of course, you know a little tongue-in-cheek, a game development of course. The lower one was to teach each grader about robotics. 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 had a contract to teach fourth graders about Colorado history, and that game was deployed on the Pikes Peak library district website. All of the games we built as a company, except for the Colorado History Arcade game were using C-Sharp, we happened to use XNA Game Studio to do that. But now of course we're moved on to Unity. The company hasn't, but I have. That brings us to this next slide where I tell you I now have a small company. By small, I mean just me called Burning Teddy. I use that company to publish textbooks and online courses and of course also to do game development. 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. It's going to take a little while to port. But at some point that will be on the Burning Teddy website, burningteddy.com. I'm also working on another smaller casual game that's called balloons extreme. I'll actually post my progress on burningteddy.com as I build that game in Unity. Burning Teddy, all the game development I'm doing is actually in Unity. 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. Riding a bike is one of my joys in life, I guess. 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 and not racing so much, but doing long rides like a number of centuries which are 100-mile bike rides, including at the time, one of the 10 toughest centuries in the United States. That century had over 10,000 feet of climbing. That's what makes a 100-mile bike ride harder than another is elevation gain. 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. 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. 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. Once you've biked along time and run along time, you say, well, you might as well do some triathlons as well, just add a swim and you'll be fine. I've done a variety of triathlons all the way from sprint distance, which are really short, all the way up to an Iron man distance race. I also play guitar. I started doing that way back in high school and then gave it up for decades while I was raising my family and doing other things. Now I've started up again to try to learn how to do it even better than I used to. Moving from left to right, the acoustic is a Yamaha acoustic that I bought way back when, while I was just out of high school. The next guitar is Joe's Drummer replica. Fender came out with a Joe Drummer tribute guitar some years ago, and that was my starting point. But I replaced the three saddled bridge with the six-saddle bridge because that's what Joe Drummer used. I got to that relict pickguard from a place called extreme creations. I even took the stickers that were on Joe Drummer's guitar and cut them into the shapes that they were worn into by the time Joe stopped playing the guitar and I fixed them to the guitar in the appropriate places. The next guitar is a Gibson Les Paul gold top from a couple of years ago. The one all the way on the right is my most recent guitar, that is a Fender Stratocaster American Professional II. I didn't have a strat, so I wanted to strap, but I also couldn't resist getting it in the gorgeous Miami blue color. 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. The question is, what kind of video games do I play? You should pause the video, guess in your mind what those might be. Then you can move on to see a screenshot of what I used to play my video games, who can see racing games are my passion, so really racing simulations. Realistic racing games rather than Arcade racing games. 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, 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.
