Hi. Here is a recap of Day 52 of my 60 day challenge to become a Unity Game Developer!
The last few days have been busy. We are just about to finish up mvp for this game. Today was particularly difficult for me. We were supposed to be on our very last day for development so I was rushing to get some things done, thought all was well, pushed my code up to our dev branch, a teammate tried to pull it in and poof, 3 hours later and we were just finally able to get all of the code working without any serious errors or screwy behavior; Some things needed to be redone completely. It was both mortifying and humbling.
As I reflect now on how I could’ve avoided this, there are a number things that stick out.
Do Not Rush
Take your time to do it right the first time before pushing it up. No excuses.
Be Thorough When Testing!
Is this doing absolutely everything that it’s supposed to be doing exactly the way it should be doing it? Ok, yeah it runs fine now but what if I do this?
Be Honest About Where You’re At. Are You Really Going To Be Done By That Deadline?
It’s easy to want to appease people or try to ensure you’re not holding your team back but its better to take the extra 1–2 hours on your end to get your feature right than rushing into a push and end up taking 3 hours of everyone’s time trying to debug your stuff… trust me, I know.
Be A Team Player
Being a team player isn’t just about helping teammates when they have issues, it’s also about being a good communicator. Communicate where you are with things, communicate when you find you have to deviate from your designated task to fix something else, communicate when you have problems, or are falling behind. Communication is king! It also helps make sure everyone is on the same page and that there are no surprises.
These are all things that I greatly need to improve on. The light in all of this was how cool everyone was about it. I’m really so lucky to be on a team of people who helped me through all of it with a good attitude even though I took up a lot of their valuable time.
Look forward to putting my best foot forward tomorrow. This week has been kicking my butt a bit so tomorrow I’ll post a couple of blogs on what happened during Days 50 and 51. I’ll hopefully also be able to give an update on our game which should be fully functional by tomorrow!!
Until then.
