Every Saturday I publish a report reflecting on the previous week. These reflections exist to demonstrate my progress, share my experiences and help transfer what I learn to others.

 

The Past Week

I began development with my new SHIFT team this week (last week was just setting up). It went fairly well, I completed my programming task easily which was to create the base for the game’s core mechanic. Although, I was forced to waste a bit too much time reading up the existing code base. Next week I’ll be helping Danijel (our leader and animator) to get the new Mecanim system working on the code side, but I don’t have any background on Mecanim so I started learning it with Unity’s tutorials. I also began practicing low polygon, stylized 3D art as am hoping to create game assets for both my own projects and others’ by selling them on the Unity Asset Store and the new GameDev Market. I tested the waters by making a simple barrel and a pine tree by following tutorials from PigArt YouTube channel, but plan on designing my own models in the future. I’ve dabbled into basic 3D modelling and animation before using Blender, here is some of my previous work for a university elective:

As you can see my skills are fairly basic, which is why I decided to go the low polygon route for starters, and as I level up I’ll make more detailed models. One major change this week was my new schedule. I finally managed to organize my time in a way that lets me actively enhance my skills, finish my work and have time for myself and loved ones. Here is the schedule (Friday & Saturday is weekend):

 

 

The new schedule worked really well for me, and it’s flexible enough that I study or work on whatever is most urgent at the moment. Among the subjects am studying right now is Electronic Engineering and Game Design. I study EE basics mainly off the text books available on All About Circuits. The reason why am studying EE is, first I’ve always been more enamored with hardware than software (I liked to open up broken equipment and look inside as a kid). Second, I joined Google’s new Little Box Challenge that’s calling for the next evolution in power inverters. When I stumbled upon it I thought this is a good excuse to start learning more about electronic devices and how they work, so I signed up. (P.S. Deadline to join is 30th of September, if you’re interested). As for game design, I’ve been building lots of prototypes while working with the book, Challenges for Game Designers. I highly recommend it for anyone interested in making games, the writer’s practical approach to explaining the various components of games and how they’re designed and built is really the best way to learn design. I mean, you’re not going to learn much by just reading about it, you need to do it!

 

The biggest problems I was having this past week were the constant interruptions from my family while I was trying to work. They often broke my concentration for minor things. Also, we’ve been having a lot of trouble with our broadband connection, which is why am late on releasing this particular reflection. Without internet I had no choice but to wait till today and go to a coffee shop to write (which is where am sitting now). This is quite troublesome, and internet problems aren’t exactly rare in Bahrain, but I can’t afford to waste so much time. My study time for today now went to writing this article.

 

Analyzing Problems

The problem with SHIFT’s current code base is lack of documentation and standardized conventions. Random naming of variables and functions, no comments what-so-ever and no guide lines to how the project is aught to be engineered led to wasted time for any new programmer joining the team. As for my family’s interruptions, they’re simply not aware of my work time.

My lack of a backup-plan in case of an internet-outage lead to this article’s delay, so I’ll need to create one.

 

What’s Next

I’ve mentioned the issue with lack of guidelines to the SHIFT team with an unanimous agreement, so this week I’ll be writing a wiki for it. I’ll also explain my work schedule to my family so they know when am working.

Batelco, Bahrain’s supreme-ruler of the Telecom companies, is offering a new cheap 4G data-plan for youth. I’ll try it out and see if I can work well with it. If so, I’ll use it as my main internet connection, and use our home broadband as backup instead.

 

This is my longest reflection yet, I hope you benefited from it. Please share with me your feedback and opinion by commenting below or sending me an email via the contact page.

Cheers 🙂