Senior Production - Making it Through Midmortems and Onboarding New Members
The first few weeks of any project are always the toughest and slowest for a programmer. When first starting, you’re brainstorming potential ideas, so there really isn’t anything to work on. Likewise, when having to onboard new members after a whole month’s break, we haven’t established a clear vision of where we want the finished product to be, so a lot of the time spent within this first week or two is getting the team up to date on what the concept of the game is, and getting them familiar with the systems, art direction, and code architecture.
After Midmortems, we have now gained one additional programmer, two artists, two designers, one producer, and a QA specialist. This week, at least on the programming side, will be primarily dedicated to cleaning up the existing project, removing any old unnecessary files, and cleaning up the repository, as well as doing some early bug fixing on things we know currently exist in the project. Nat and I will walk through the code base and existing systems with Alex and Wes and answer any questions they might have. Alex said he wanted to do some mockups of potential tools he thinks might help streamline some of the art pipeline, so he’ll be looking into that.
As excited as I am to get started again on this game, I have my worries and my doubts. I’m a bit self-conscious about my abilities; I know what my weaknesses, tendencies, and bad habits are, so I take criticism and judgement pretty harshly. So bringing on newer members who I feel have better skills than me and more knowledge than me makes me nervous about being judged. I have some doubts about the scalability of our game, and how much new content we’ll be able to add that doesn’t feel repetitive. Our game feels a bit limited in terms of what we can do with the space we’re given; what sort of environments can you encapsulate within a 10ft x 10ft environment? What interactions can you provide the player that keep them engaged, but don’t grow old? How can we make our game feel lively and fun and keep it true to our original vision? I don’t know the answers to these, but I will trust in the abilities of my peers to help drive this game in a direction we’ll all be happy about.
