Ryan T. Miller

Thoughts on the Project:

I was still quite fresh to coding, and brand new to Unity, never had used it in my life until now, so when we broke the programmers up into three groups, Junior, Mid, and Senior, and I was placed on Mid, I felt a lot of pressure. The Senior programmers handled the deployment and architecture of the Unity Project, along with major gameplay features, while the Mid programmers worked on any code that the Senior's requested or didn't have time for, and the Junior programmers primarily handled tweaking variables for gameplay purposes and any remaining code that needed done.

This team was huge for a game jam. I couldn't believe how many people were on the team. To be honest, I still may not recognize an artist from this team if I bumped into him or her again on the street. The producers had a lot of specific deadlines, schedules, and all of the scrum methodology mechanisms, that I had yet to learn (but oh did I later).

That being said, I simply followed instructions and did my job to the best of my abilities, focusing heavily on the input system while trying to learn Unity as fast as humanely possible. Near the end, when the senior level programmers were unavailable, time was running out, and the producers needed results, so I tried to step up and started programming whatever work was left and handing out tasks to the other remaining programmers, trying to make sure whatever could be done, was done.

Luckily, shortly before final morning check-in, the senior programmers returned to relieve us of duty, whereupon, after some 16+ hours straight of programming, I passed out. When I awoke, the game was done aside from some balancing, so I got right back to work on that.

This project definitely showed me a side of what a larger team could be like, and made me aware that you need to be mindful of as many aspects of the game as possible because you never know when someone else's task may fall in your lap.