60 days to become a game developer. Day 43.

Hello there. Today is Day 43 of my 60 day challenge to become a Unity Game Developer!

Man, today definitely feels like the start of something big! As mentioned in my last post, today was the first day of our first group build 🙌. We will be building and publishing a game all within 14 days.

Here is a quick glimpse of some starter assets just to give you an idea of what it will look like…sort of:

Pretty cool, right?

Here’s a breakdown of how the day went:

MEETINGS!

but seriously, it was basically just a day filled with meetings.

Very important ones though!

Meeting 1:

• The first thing our team did this morning was go through some general guidelines and expectations. We got a better understanding of how our days would be structured over the course of the next 14 days. We also took some time to review our different project options and come to a decision on which one we wanted to do. We ended up going with the option shown in the image above.

Meeting 2:

• Al from GameDevHQ did an awesome workshop on how to create a spawn management system by simply using a game object array and a few lines of code! Dangggg, to see how he was able to achieve spawning behavior using just a few lines of code was super helpful for me as my spawn manager in the 2D shooter project was something that I struggled with. The lessons that I usually take away from Al’s workshops are to keep it simple and the inspector is your friend. In this meeting he also clarified what the requirements of the projects are and some ways in which we could approach certain features.

Meeting 3:

• Combed through the project requirements and started to discuss what each of us wanted to do (shown below).

• After getting to know some of my teammates better I realize that there seems to be pretty good balance on the team. There are some who love art and designing the UI elements, there are other who prefer the back end, and some who just rock at it all (you know who you are! 😏). Whether the powers at be did it intentionally or not I love that it seems we all kind of mesh well as far as what are strengths and weaknesses are. For myself personally, I really enjoyed creating power ups and other player features such as the thruster and health bars that I created in the space shooter game for example. For this reason I volunteered to work on the player health features as well as work with a teammate to create a weapon powerup system! I have a feeling I’ll have fun with that one.

Meeting 4:

• Last but certainly not least, my personal favorite topic ever, GIT! Here’s a snapshot of some of the stuff we went over:

Thank the sweet heavens for cheat sheets!!!!!

All the sarcasm aside, in the meeting I learned A LOT. Sooo thankful that we have really awesome leads to guide us through this crazy topic, well crazy for me anyways. I was also very glad that today it was a planned git meeting rather than the kind of, oh geeze… wait!!….crash, burn, and someone please saveeeee meeeee kind of scenario that I’ve found myself in a couple of times during this internship. I will definitely learn quick whether or not these late night impromptu git crash courses has paid off as we will be doing all of our collaboration on Github. Getting practice using git on a team was one of my major goals coming into this internship. I know I grumble a lot about how much git stuff I still have to learn and to be frank, what a royal pain in the 🍑 git can be sometimes but I still truly believe that this is one of the most important skills that I need to get good at while I’m here. Wish me luck.

Final Thoughts:

Tomorrow we will be diving into the actual project! Again, I’ll be focusing on player health and weapons to start. SO excited to see how this turns out. Everyone on our team brings their own set of strengths, talent and work ethic. You can tell that we all genuinely want to be here and are serious about making this opportunity count. If I was a betting girl, I’d definitely bet on good things to come.

Catch you soon.