Saturday 4 June 2011

Student Project - Progress Report and some Disillusion towards small Projects

The project is deep in production and we are experiencing some difficulties I thought would be avoidable in a project that small and with so few people involved.

Being almost the only one with programming experience was clear for me from the beginning but the amount of work I have to do to get some "simple" mechanics to work properly has me overwhelmed and stumbling at times. Fortunately there is another team member with programming skills that helped out at these times and I could take a step back and reassess the situation.

Another disillusion I experienced was the fact that even in a team with five people work can stagnate and a good "leadership" is needed. I put leadership in parenthesis because it is more the internal communication the team lead lacks as the skill to lead others in the right direction or the right goal. We are all just students at a game design school and we don't know any better. Some students in higher semesters said the first project is doomed to fail and the failure serves as a learning experience for future projects. We joked about it and tried to optimize the concept to avoid any pitfalls and make it a game that we can actually make in the given time frame but with all the courses and now even some exams we somehow lost track of our schedule and have fallen behind. I took too much time to research features of Unity and other interesting aspects of game development.
The idea or vision of our game is clear to everyone but there is no additional game design that everyone knows and that is constantly updated to see the real progress we made so far.
Our project is still a work in progress and I don't know how far we are with the other aspects like level design or graphics because I just lost track of the overall progress but most of the core features on the scripting side are implemented and need to be tested, tweaked and finalized for me to move on to other aspects of the game that need some coding.

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