This week, I was able to package and help Dan organise the final bit of the game and the presentation from the gameplay. My wife had to be hospitalised due to suspicion of pulmonary emboli due to the labour, and it shook everything in my life. I had some latest conclusions to share from a privileged perspective after the request of Extenuating Circumstance about the adventure of this latest module and the numb in between the end and my writings.
Group contributions: presentation finalisation
As soon as I got back to work, I found some space in my life to finalise the game with the latest build integrated with the scenes produced by Dan, menus and gameplay reviewed. In the middle of all chaos, that is, the reception of a newborn, I got pretty happy to collaborate with the rest of the team and send all the content that we agreed at the time stipulated.
The gameplay wasn’t polished enough; there was so much to make a launchable game; however, the collaboration with all team members was productive at the end; we produced a good number of assets and made a playable game.
The video production took a considerable amount of time; from the experience of the previous module, I spent around 8 hours of work for a couple of minutes recorded and edited. Then, maybe practising more, it became easier.
The trust also has to be mentioned; we asked ourselves during this presentation if everything agreed would be done, and every time we got the same conclusion, it would be delivered. It was.
Related to the quality and performance perspective, we never established an explicit parameter over both terms. We never discussed the ideal game and what metric we would use to verify our progress; we focused and pursued our personal goals not distant from the common goal. The lack of clarity over those parameters certainly affected our final project. Looking from a foreign perspective, this should be better described at the beginning of the project.
As an overall experience, the group activity was excellent; I got astonished to end well and delivered in time. The communication was fluid, and the commitment was impressive. I don’t know if I’ll have enough time to afford this kind of collaboration in the next module, but I’ll certainly look to work with external contributors.
Personal development: game packaging
The usage of a CI/CD configuration paid the initial effort at this activity. After that, generate a build or record the gameplay was easy and fast. However, in opposite the use of Git wasn’t so easy. Conflicts were time-consuming, and even simple activities as merge the code produced disturbed the workflow.
Conclusions: dealing with the fear and wrapping up
The most disturbing aspect of this project’s end was my wife’s hospitalisation; Everything went well, and she recovered to home. However, the fear to lose her was frightened. On Wednesday, before we submitted the assignment, I had to take her to the hospital because she started coughing and breathing difficulty. We only got back home later that night. My eldest son stayed with my parents in law. We were with the baby there because of the breastfeeding.
I interpreted this experience as an alert for the important thing’s of life and how brief they are. I don’t know if I had enough time to digest it properly, but it impacted me.
At the end of the module, I reviewed our production, my research and notes on how the work was conducted. Besides that dramatic end from my side, I think we had a good interaction as a team. However, we could perform better if we had more experience and a clear set of parameters and on how much effort each one would bring to the table.
I started from my perspective; I believe I should have focused since the beginning on the game production, helping more at the art direction and design in general. However, I got so much knowledge using Machine Learning to train intelligent actors. Therefore, I want to experiment with different usages for the techniques I learned and continue investing more time in it.
Regarding the course module content, my conclusion is that the content was not deep. Some of the videos, especially initially, had some relationship with my work experience, but they lacked connection with what we were living at the project production. This general impression became accentuated at the end of the project and might be related to my private life events. However, I needed to mention it here.
And I was connecting the latest and most crucial dot to my goal with the course. I started this module keen to work with the team, the formation was fluid, and the general experience was satisfactory. Still, I don’t feel it contributed to constructing an indie game studio by itself, and neither collaborated with my academic formation. So I think it was a module in between two worlds.
Lucas Souza 