Unreal Outcomes

What have I accomplished this week as a developer?

This week was the polar opposite of the last, instead of going out and making any public appearances this week was spent hunkered down smashing out as much as possible on my personal experience game. Since I had endeavoured to learn as much as possible in 2 weeks by trying to learn an entirely new game engine there was a lot of behind the scene research that went into what seems like an incredibly simple game. All of this research however payed off as I came up against many different hurdles in the development cycle but ended up coming to conclusions and work arounds to get things working all by myself. Similarly to last week this gave me a huge sense of confidence in my skills. I really enjoyed working in the Unreal Engine and have even started planning a side project in the engine with Victor, i found the visual scripting style of the blueprint system really clicked with me early on making the project flow nicely, hopefully the side project will go as smoothly. Even though I really enjoyed the step into Unreal making this game has really given me huge amounts of drive towards getting better in Unity, I see all the amazing games my peers are making and in such versatile styles, I think due to my lack of confidence in scripting learning Unreal was a coping mechanism. I can’t wait to get stuck into Unity in the second project of the trimester, after our trip to GOMA I already have multiple ideas flowing and can’t wait to bring them to life with some C#. I have taken the advice of my lecturer and started following the Unity created tutorials to sharpen up my coding skills and really hope to wow everyone with what I can accomplish in one week. I ended up finishing up my personal experience game Sibling Sabotage which can be found on my Itch.io page, Victor and I also got our HCD completed for our new project which we will be working on in the coming weeks, stay tuned!

What have I learned this week about development and being a developer?

This week I learned the importance of creating a positive image for myself as a developer not only in person but also Online. As i only joined twitter recently I have spent some of my downtime trawling through other indie developers pages and seeing the kind of content they tweet out and the kind of image they are creating for themselves. This was incredibly interesting as some were extremely professional and others more on the relaxed side of things. It was however the more professional people i saw that held industry jobs at high ranking companies. I saw some developers and know some up and coming students who have gotten pretty bad reputations which has drastically impacted not only their opportunities but their future work as teams don’t seem to want to work with them. In the upcoming group projects I greatly look forward to working in a team as during the holiday Make-a-thing I found out a lot about myself and what I can bring to a team and I look forward to putting that into action in a professional and positive way.