Mckenzie Lippa

My face and a Rosebug	Some basic info
	Mckenzie Lippa, 2024, CS major

Short Bio

I started college way back in 2018 at my first school, Marist. In high school I hadn't tried very hard until my junior year of school, I was too focused on social stuff and I hated my classes. I don't like memorizing things or following rubrics, I'd rather apply the material in my own way and create something cool and open ended (though I understand why we don't do this stuff usually it gets taken advantage of and people don't do the work properly or care much). So I ended up at a small college in New York where I tried 5 different majors: biomedical sciences on a pre med track, english, animation/digital media, Media and design, Game design, games and computing tech, and then I transfered to BU where I majored in computer science. This is hopefully my last term before I can graduate. During COVID I was a junior and I had a single dorm room with no roommates. My school wanted to keep us paying for housing so they strung us along and kept us in the dorm rooms when ever there was a quarentine. There would be multiple weeks at a time that would go by where I was not allowed to see anyone. I had to keep the tv running constantly to stave off lonlynees as I was trapped in a 300 sq ft dorm (or smaller idk) like a prisoner in solitary confinement I was taking photography then and several students made pieces relating their time in covid to their recent spike in alcoholism. I have always been fascinated by the arts and expressing the true beauty and dispear of hardship. I think the best art comes from the worst pain and the greatest joy, something so extreme you can't help but try in vain to process or savor the moment in any way possible. I've been working on a game for a while but its always being stalled because I get stuck on tutorials and not believing I am capable enough to create it. I wanted to learn to code because that was my biggest weakness with the game creation and now here I am.

Activities and Interests

Picture of Activity	Title	Description	Useful Links
	Digital Art and Cartoons	Drawing and painting characters on procreate, usually chibis but I am currently learning how to draw portraits so that I can improve both my shading and my ability to draw realistic people before I move to the character portrait stage of my game. Currently most of my art is on instagram when I'm brave enough to post it. (The algorithm has changed a lot and sometimes its hard to get engagement with flat art works without trying to do something gimicky or funny)	Instagram Page
	Game Design on Godot	I have tried many different engines and godot is probably my favorite. I have created all of the art and animation myself and have been working on the character portraits and the cooking UI for that element of the game. Currently it seems I have to update my foundation for v4.3 since when I tried getting this screenshot I was informed that my item description export was depretiated.	My favorite godot youtuber
	Animating characters	Animation takes forever and usually doesn't feel worth it but it was fun to work on and I recently tried using procreate dreams to animate a dance but it took me like 4 hours to do the first 7 seconds (168 drawings) so I haven't worked on it in a while, not sure why I want to use up so much free time doing it or what the point is either I should probably rotoscope but it seems like cheating to me so im not sure but it would save hundreds of hours so idk. I also like singing and had a great idea for a parody but am still too much of a chicken to post it so I also haven't been working on it.	Elton John cover animation