Scarf Girl

This was my first university project, and from the start of the games development we knew that there would be a few challenges. While we had plenty of engineers on the team, we ran into the issue of only having one artist. She was amazing, but the problem lied in that she really specialized in 2D art, and the game we were making was 3D. We also had to make sure we weren’t overloading her with work or burning her out.

To prevent that, I decided to step into a role that I wasn’t too familiar with, and worked in Maya to do both 3D modeling, and some rigging for the game. Though I had been taught before how to do both until this moment I hadn’t really done anything of worth in the program. So this really was an opportunity to learn the programs in earnest. Doing that I was able to discover that, while I didn’t possess the knowledge, I really enjoyed doing the work.

I did feel like I could’ve been more proactive on this project. While I never found myself struggling for things to do, I found myself suffering from some procrastination and boredom from the things I had to do. This I couldn’t determine if it was the work, which I did enjoy doing, or if it was just the school year in general.

The team for this project was small, meaning that while I could help with the production, most things were just self-organized. Though if I could ask for one thing it would be better communication with the programming team. Everyone was assigned tasks, but I never felt like I really understood what they were doing or where they were progress wise. Having a better for of standups would’ve worked well for this but sadly we could only meet up once a week for an hour, this prevented any sort of daily standup.

This project helped me learn a lot about production, as well as many skills that will help me in my future projects. I am very excited that this was my first project with the University.