Confessions of a Math Programmer
Parents today are scared of how technology messes with their children’s dopamine levels. The spell-binding-endorphin-firing video games and especially mobile video games are probably their worst enemies. Hypotenuse aims to do the opposite — it’s goal is to relax and be meditative and that’s the validation I got after debuting our app at the Berlin Games Week & the AmazeFest last weekend. It has been a crazy last month with a pre-launch fiasco to launching and building and building and launching in preparation for the Berlin Games Fest. But seeing how people used Hypotenuse plus the first hand feed back I received felt like all the hard work paid off. “This is really relaxing” was a constant phrase from the ones who really got it. And the ones who didn’t seem to get it right away really showed me what to polish up and even then, some of them still thought it was relaxing.
Of course, one of the main reasons for creating this app was to be able to enjoy relaxing with geometry on the go whenever and where ever I wanted. A noble pursuit that I, naturally, imagine would be lauded by all those who have their name carved into Bulter library at Columbia University. But there’s a more sinister pleasure lurking under the hood of this game, a harded drug than any 1970s New Yorker could ever get their hands on, the endorphin-dopamine bomb that, parents beware, can hook your kids in a heart beat — it’s called Math Programming!
Building this game has been such a rush. I’ve learned so much more about geometry, mathematics, and of course, programming along the way. But the strange thing about building a game about math, geometry in particular, which takes so many other kinds of math to make (cartesian algebra, trig, linear algebra, graph theory… [posts on these to follow]) the lines between the programming, the math, and the game itself become blurred and then magically the computer you type on and the phone you play on just become these intricate fragile equations swirling in your hands and it’s almost as if you could just blow them all away…
Or maybe it’s just the story of another Math Programming fatality…
