Agile Workshop

We had an agile workshop last week with a little Lego activity to test ourselves on our learnings. I elected myself as the scrum master.

There was a lot to take away from that class. My dad himself is a project manager at an IT company, so understanding what is essentially the core of what he does helps put a lot of things in perspective for me. A lot of things he used to say make sense to me now.

There is a lot to think about when it comes to agile though, a lot of which doesn’t make immediate sense to me but I’m sure with time and experience will. I remember relating myself to all those experiences in groups where someone wasn’t on the same page as everyone else, or no one knew anyone else, or someone wasn’t as passionate as the people around them, or someone just simply wasn’t skilled enough to do the job, all of which tanked whole projects.

I also really liked the whole idea of how at the end of every sprint you should have a useful product, and keep iterating on it. I find this especially useful because of the way of the way that I used to work when I was making animations for my Thesis projects. Whenever someone saw my project while I was working on it, I would have to tell them “I know it looks pretty terrible right now, but trust me it’s going to look different in the end”, and then in the end, even though usually it did look better there were definitely times when my project was just simply not good enough, and there was no time to go back and iterate again.

Whatever was done on that day definitely did spark excitement in me to work in a team again, and I wouldn’t mind being a scrum master again, because for one I did quite enjoy that, but also because thinking from a long-term goal basis, it’s useful to be able to manage teams and just generally get along with people.

Unity Workshop

Continuing from last time, I made a huge amount of progress since my last post, where I was trying to rip off an old Atari game “Combat” and make it in Unity.

I expressed my concerns to Paul, told him how the rigid body system wasn’t working as I wanted it to, and he basically helped me solve my problem, and then went on to say “yeah but there’s a new better input system, and your project would work better with the newer input system”.

He was definitely right, and I spent most of my free time over the week trying to learn the new input system. I added in a shooting function as well, but I’m still not sure if it works because it hasn’t been linked to an input yet.

I didn’t find much time to do a lot of unity stuff though, between all the bank work I had it was difficult. But my weekends were mostly spent on Unity learning the new Input System.

The game even looks much more like the original combat now, here is a picture from a week back

and here’s a picture of it now

While I started making this, I kept thinking about how Will mentioned a very long time back that a lot of games developed focused on war, or the premise of war, and how in some sense that is more a masculine than a feminine thing.

The aim for the next week is to at least have a working version of it, a “Minimum Viable Product”. I feel like all the hard stuff is over, and it should be easygoing now.

Other Stuff

I couldn’t finish the book I borrowed from the public library, “name of the game” by WIll Eisner. I wish I did finish it because it had been a pretty good read so far. Made a fair bit of progress on photography as well, and have been consuming a lot of media since then.

Started playing Fallout New Vegas, I’m not sure what it is about fallout but its the one series where I’ve spent an absurd amount of time playing their games. Fallout and Red dead redemption 2 have pretty much eaten up the last 2-3 years.

I wish I could say I did a lot but between all the boring bank work I had to do until Saturday, I was just killing time and energy on the most mundane things and I kept thinking my time is better spent elsewhere. I even tried to start a new course on linkedin learning on game design foundations, but couldn’t get past 3 videos because I was so occupied.

The goal for the next week is to just get back into it. I need to spend less time trying to figure out the most efficient way to transfer funds, and more time focusing myself on what matters. And I know as long as I just keep doing something, even if its anything, its still progress. They say when you’re in a slump, the best way forward is to just take a step, any step, even if its one small step in the right direction everyday. Not that I’m going through a slump by any means, but I just need to start taking my steps.

I do think I’ve made a lot of progress on my long term goals though. I still can’t say I know for a fact that I know what I want to do as soon as I get out of college, because theres a lot of options and I’m not sure how much I don’t know I don’t know yet. But I can tell that the job market in the UK is not that great at the moment, and if I want any hope of securing myself a job, I’m going to have to work much harder than everyone else.

That means learning the engine, learning C#, learning game design principles, agile workflows, and all while keeping myself connected to what makes this worth doing in the first place, the strong connection we as individuals have to culture and society through arts.

That’s a lot to keep in mind, but at the same time, for one year it’s a fair number of things to focus on to perfect over a year. It’s extremely doable, as long as I keep my head to it.

I just had an idea while I was writing this, maybe it’s really stupid, but I thought it’s worth trying anyway. Here’s a little report card on how much progress I’ve made on individual things. I think I’ll come up with a more accurate way to rate myself over the week, need to figure out what having a certain number of stars means…

Photography

My saving grace, is the one thing that still makes me feel like I’m making art. I’m starting to realise the only reason I’m not so depressed yet is because I grab the camera and go out for a walk every once in a while, all while feeling like I’m making art.

Anyway here are some photographs from the week