Self Reflection. Week 1

So begins my new journey documenting and discussing my work in a professional setting, I only hope to not disappoint! To outline the purpose of this series and what I hope to accomplish with it, I'd like to start by letting you all know that this is a learning experience for me still, and that many things may be subject to change as the weeks go on and I learn more about what I can and can't do with what I have. I'm still trying to get the hang of a lot of these processes and it can be a bit messy. That's okay though, since you can make an omelet without at least cracking a few eggs, mistakes shouldn't stop you from continuing to push forward!

That being said, the purpose this blog is to serve is both a self reflection on my week's work, but also a way to present and document a lot of my thoughts and processes along the way, with the goal that I can look back on it and either learn something new or find something new to be proud of while also showing to anyone who decides to research me for a job application or what-have-you what I'm capable of.

That being said, I only started this new schedule system of mine a day ago, so there's not a whole lot to talk about right now in terms of progress aside from the one day's worth of newly scheduled progress and the schedule itself, but for the first post, I think that's suitable enough.

This schedule of mine is composed of setting up two different tasks for me to spend at least an hour working on every day, with the tasks shifting up every day in at least a broad sense to keep things balanced and fresh. With my primary desire to work on both video game design and programming as well as properly network and connect with fellows in that industry to start making a name for myself, as well as a secondary desire to learn more about coding in a broader, less game-focused sense, I'm in no shortage of tasks to do!

I've set myself up tasks for working on two separate projects, one in the Unity game engine whereas the other is in Unreal Engine 4. Of the two, the Unity project is also getting separate tasks for design work specifically, as it is also a personal passion project I am aiming to get a proper proof of concept out of in the future for at the very least, usage on my portfolio. The Unreal Engine tasks meanwhile are generally more broad and non-specific for any sort of project since it serves more as a way for me to just get used to the engine more in general since while I'm not exactly new to it anymore, I still think I could use more practice with it to get it on par with my knowledge of Unity.

Past that there's two other important tasks I want to bring up that I'm trying to push myself to do for the sake of my career. The former is I think a universally useful aspect to coding that I strongly believe I need to improve, being coding optimization, while the latter is more about keeping the coding mindset in my head even when it's not necessarily a coding-intensive day, being listening to coding or game development-based podcast. Getting extra thoughts and opinions about some things I may or may not know is important in getting me to ask more questions and encourage my own research so I can expand my horizons of what I understand!

After all that setup, here's what I managed to actually get done these past few days, though.

First, I set my first task on Thursday to be updating my resume, as it has been used for years now, still containing old classwork I don't believe is very relevant anymore, especially after all the growth I've had since then. I got rid of the old and put in some more recent work of mine that I think better shows what I'm capable of, like the tutoring job I held for 2 years and the Game Programmer Internship I held working on Enemy AI and animator logic. I also condensed some of my personal skills up to ensure it still kept a single page limit and was good to go.

The second task I had for Thursday was podcasting, and so I looked around and found a podcast called "Programming Throwdown" by Patrick Wheeler and Jason Gauci and just to sort of ease into it, I found their episode on the Unity engine and gave it a listen. Can't say I was expecting an entire discussion on the difference between i++ and ++i and supposedly how it falls down to more of a preference than anything, but it was nice to hear about something I understood right off the bat!

Friday started off with me working on some design work for my personal project, code name "Brutal Beauty". It's a project I've already designed a lot for, and since it was on my mind most recently, I wanted to finally sit down and finally figure out how one of the game's characters would look like. Now I'm no artist, so I didn't start drawing her myself, but I went around and looked for a bunch of useful reference images and then added them to a document that included a specific description of how each reference fit into the greater whole of the design, so I easily have something to give artists to commission in the future. I think being able to see the fruits of your labor in a physical form like that can really help with motivation so you keep getting things done, so I believe this was a great step forward.

Aside from that, Friday's other task is just writing these out, so I won't be really talking about it too much after this post.

However, I will say that so far, I'm admittedly a bit skeptical since things like the podcasting and "code optimization" feel a bit out of my comfort zone and I'm not entirely sure how I'll be able to keep up, but I think that's especially why I want to at least try and see if I can or can't do it, so I can learn and know what works for me. I'm especially happy with the progress I made this "week" though, so at the very least, I think this is an important step forward for me, and I hope it continues for as long as it needs to.

Thank you for reading this admittedly kind of massive post, hopefully it'll get shorter from here on out!

-Jared Bronstein