Self Reflection: Week 2

So for my first full week of assignments to go through, there was definitely a lot of new things I had to go through as well as a bit of figuring out the details of plans I already had set out from last week. There was bound to be some hiccups so I'm not too worried about it, on the contrary, I'm happy that they happened as early as they have so I have a better opportunity to address and hopefully fix them moving forward.

So for Saturday, I had set out to work on the UI of my "Codename Blast" project, the Unreal FPS game I started. Admittedly, I kinda threw this and the other goal for this project this week out on a limb, and wasn't quite sure entirely what to do with them, so I ended up switching that goal to be more about a simple pause feature that allowed you to freeze the game temporarily and unpause whenever you wish, as well as begin to start adding compatibility for a health system, which allowed for the player to now take 3 hits until they die while enemies took 2, being alerted to the player's presence when the first shot was taken. I made these changes because again, I didn't have a specific UI in mind that I felt I should implement, I felt that it was too vague of an assignment to really have a cohesive beginning and end, especially when there wasn't much to put in a menu element yet. So moving forward, I intend to make sure each and every one of my goals are very clear and concise, allowing for specific end points to follow to ensure it can be properly followed.

Saturday in general just had a bit of issues in regards to what I had initially set out to do for it, so my second, less intensive task, meant to be an hour set aside to researching studios and companies for specific job openings to apply to outside of what LinkedIn provides me, ended up again, being too vague to really be able to follow properly, so I decided to switch it around and instead just spend that time applying to jobs over LinkedIn. Same as mentioned earlier, I believe the issues here are in not having clear enough goals to follow that I believe will be important to adjust moving forward, and will do my best to improve for next week.

Sunday I felt was much better by comparison, with it starting with a coding implementation of the MP system in Brutal Beauty which from the start was already much more precise of a goal to work towards that I had no issues with. The main point of it was to implement the basics of MP use and gain, and then leave the space open for next time where I'd implement the template for the specific abilities that would use MP, and I believe in that aspect I did rather well. Past that, my second goals was mainly in terms of networking, which I decided would focus more specifically on professional connections I've already formed, as well as more personal connections with people that are in similar situations as my own. Former colleagues in school or other projects for example. The reason I decided on having this as a goal was I felt that it was rather important to keep connections strong with people, and I wanted to include those from school I might not normally find the time to talk to to ensure they don't fade away from my memory as I would from theirs. You never know who'll help you get your next job after all!

Monday was the second day I had worked on my "Codename Blast" project, and again, the initial plan was to implement doors in a similar vein to the Metroid Prime games, but because of how things were shaping out, I changed that goal to instead work on adding a limited ammo system to the game that allowed you to fire out projectiles that dealt double damage to enemies, instantly defeating them, but with only 5 shots able to be made before running out. I also added a small bonus detail of regaining a missile when an enemy is killed. Simple, but I like those details so I try to keep them in mind. After this, my simpler goal for the day was to find a game development podcast to listen to just to keep that on my mind, and I ended up settling on one called "Eggplant: The Secret Lives of Games" where I had listened to their 135th episode called "Harnessing the Algorithm with Eric Chahi". I'll admit, like last week with the programming podcast, it was a bit hard for me to really follow since I had never really heard of this Eric Chahi person before and a solid amount of it was discussing his previous works I had no context for. Still, there was some interesting tidbits about how you choose to make a game in the sense of what comes first, mechanics, story, or setting and how do you build around that. For me, I feel like mechanics are generally the most centralizing aspect to my thoughts when it comes to game development, so I tend to start there and start piecing together a story as I go.

Tuesday was where I had gone back to the design work for Brutal Beauty and specifically starting looking into reference imagery for the various stages the player would have to traverse. I had described them briefly in the design document already but felt that more tangible imagery would help in the future when reaching out to artists so I had primarily conversed with a close friend about it to keep my energy levels high and grabbed at least 3 images for each stage. In retrospect, I think that was a bit too much to ask since I had 9 different stages in mind and not only getting a cohesive enough image in my mind of each one to then know exactly what to look for as similarities, so I believe if I come back to that in some form, I'll split it up to not overwhelm myself. The other task I had for myself was the aforementioned specific company research for job application that I had swapped out from Saturday and I'll admit, it didn't really go well. As mentioned then, it really wasn't a tangible enough goal that I really knew how to work through it, so I wasn't really able to do much but just realize what I need to do better. In that sense, I'm going to limit it back down to specific job market websites instead of more vague terms, but I'll also be looking into other ways to do similar things as well to maybe improve the process.

Wednesday was the day I had implemented the abilities the MP system would be utilized for in "Brutal Beauty" and while I definitely ran into a bit of a snag, it's overall working as intended which is great. The only issue is because I'm trying to make each ability be able to do wildly different things, I had it so there was a generic ability class that I would make the parent of the classes made for each individual ability, that way it can easily be setup to not require a lot of checks between other class files, which I believe is good for the project, long term. The other task from here was professional networking and I'll be honest, it ended up being less about actual networking and more how do I network properly, since I wasn't quite sure what I was doing for that. What I ended up settling on though is that I intend to go out and find names in noteworthy studios of people who work in Gameplay Programming or similar positions to talk to, interview them through a wide variety of questions about their time in the industry, what they've learned, etc etc, and then afterwards, try to keep in touch every now and again if they are comfortable. Having this plan is great for moving forward, so hopefully this will make my networking assignments much smoother.

Thursday was mainly a portfolio-fixing day, and I took that time to add in and detail a lot of the plans and information about the two new projects I'm working on, "Codename Blast" and "Brutal Beauty", so that anyone curious would have more details about that. And you can check it for yourself by going under their tabs in the Games section of this webpage! After that, was another coding podcast day, and I just stuck with the same people as last week, Programming Throwdown and listened to their episode on Node.js. It was something I had some experience in from the past but not a lot so I wanted to see what they talked about. It was admittedly pretty hard to follow though, so I might give it another listen so I really try to let it seep in.

Finally, today, Friday the 15th, alongside writing up this report, was another design day for "Brutal Beauty" and I believe it was a very successful day for that purpose. I had forgot to setup a specific plan for it so I had no idea what to work on, but ended up settling on working on the game's store aspects a lot more in-depth with more specific mechanics and calculations to make it much clearer in regards to what's going on there, and I think the new additions I added made a lot of the other mechanics that interact with the game's store much smoother to connect, and I cannot wait to see it all in action when that time comes.

So overall, this week was a bit of a mixed bag, but it's certainly a step in the right direction for me, and I hope to continue making improvements over it to streamline it further and really give me a solid foundation to move forward with in my career and enhance my overall productivity. Can't wait for next week!