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Welcome to the Terra Linda Game Development resources website! This site is an ongoing project by founding, current, and former students of the Terra Linda Game Development program.

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This website is a living document! If you think there is something this website is missing, consider forking this website's GitHub Project and create a pull request with your additions! You can add pages, fix bugs with example code, and more.

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A Letter from Owen Bartolf

Hi! I'm Owen Bartolf! I made this website!

When I was a high school freshman in 2015, there was no computer science program at Terra Linda. I founded a small afterschool program called Innovation Lab. While I thought it only would attract a few misfits like my freshman self, it brought together a large number of diverse and unlikely friends to pursue a challenging field. With these unlikely friends, our program expanded quickly.

We pushed the school to bring computer science into the formal curriculum. The introduction of AP Computer Science A into the school's course offerings was a product of Principal Dunlap's support, Mr. Gustin's passion, and our vigorous advocacy.

Things kept moving faster after that. Innovation Lab kept experimenting with different things, including a trial run of an afterschool game development class with mentors from local game studio 2K Games that eventually evolved into what this course is today. I couldn't be happier to see that, even when I'm in college two years later, what I helped build is still going strong to this day.

I will be honest with you: this class is hard. There aren't many classes or school programs where you spend the better part of a year creating something together from concept to deliverable. Game development is permeated with interdisciplinary and organizational challenges. It is likely you will pull more than one all-nighter. It is likely a bug might drive you to insanity. It is likely a merge error will make you question your existence. These things are normal, and even expected in the demanding field of software engineering.

With that, I must tell you: there is no greatness left unguarded by challenge. Our time in Innovation Lab was not a series of successes, but rather a series of catastrophic failures. Many things, from our robots to our curriculum, just did not work most of the time. It was crushing. From the rubble, we were left to pick up the (sometimes very literal) pieces. But, when things got tough, we came together. We picked ourselves up, analyzed what went wrong, and worked together towards a different approach.

And together, we turned imagination into reality. In the shadow of our catastrophic failures, we built small victories. A midnight stroke of brilliance from a friend. A compiler error resolved. A servo spinning again. A robot moving once again. Ideas and collaborative problem solving coalesced into progress, and from the bricks of these small victories, we began to build something greater. Every success was a radical act of rebellion against the challenge. With time, with resilience, with grit and teamwork and friendship, we built something so tall that it eventually eclipsed our failures. We defied what we thought was possible. We made our dreams come true.

Engineering is about coming together to defy our notions of possibility. It's about making dreams come true. The road will not be easy, but it is one worth pursuing.

Good luck!

-- Owen Bartolf