Frankly, this wasn’t a great project for me. The combination of physical sickness early in the year and mental health issues later into the year meant I was playing catch up the entire time pretty much. I felt like I was always behind schedule and didn’t have enough work completed because most of my time was spent redoing the same things because they wouldn’t work in the first place, or they had to be changed to allow something else to fit in. I also spent a lot of time just researching and watching videos, trying to learn as much as I could about what I needed to do and the ways to do them.
It never really felt like there was a time when I could focus on this project. We spent a month or two planning a project idea that most likely wasn’t going to be what we worked on, then we had a submission that required detailed plans of the project we were going to work on for the year. The others ended up doing their original ideas, but our group had to come up with something new and flesh it all out in a week or two in time for the submission. After that was the thesis submission. We needed to research a ton in order to formulate the structure of the paper, and then we needed to write it all. That left little time to focus on this project and probably contributed to my feeling of playing catch up. After that submission we had a little time, but then we had the showcase to plan for with their numerous deadlines, and the virtual networks submission. Along with all the presentations we’ve had every few weeks and having to prepare for them, it has kind of felt like everything has been trying to take our focus away from this project, despite it being the final major project.
Working with Colin and Jamie over the course of this project has certainly been an experience. Compared to our Sheffield collaboration last year, I think this one has gone much better. Being able to use your preferred skillset with some overlap with others, I think, is a major benefit when it comes to getting work done and seeing the vision come together. We were able to plan things easily as we were all enthusiastic and we could bounce ideas off of each other since we all liked to play video games too. There have been times when we’ve needed something done before we could progress and it’s taken a while, I know I’ve been the cause of that at least once, but everyone managed to find something to do in the meantime. It is also refreshing to get a different perspective on a problem you are having. They might give you ideas for how to tackle it that you wouldn’t have thought of due to your thought process being different. Or they may even have the same approach, but being able to discuss it could lead all of you to a new solution.
In regard to my own efforts in this unit, I struggled a lot. It constantly felt like I hadn’t done much and couldn’t show off much work despite putting in the hours. There were times I would help the others with their problems, some bigger and more demanding than others, but that didn’t really feel like I was contributing work to the project.
Pretty much everything to do with the llama has taken me many more hours than you might think from what can be seen. Designing the basic concept took hours of drawing terrible concepts until a friend showed me some AI concepts as they had been generating some for their own work. That saved me a huge amount of time. Modelling the llama took even longer than drawing it. Multiple attempts from different approaches and it would never go how I wanted. My perfectionist brain really sucks when I can’t manipulate the tools the way I want to. I hated modelling that llama. Probably should have given it to Jamie to model seeing as he was handling all the rest of the modelling, but I did ask if anyone wanted to do it when we first divvied up the roles and he said I should do it seeing as the llama was my brainchild from my original project idea.
Coding the state machine was also a long and arduous task. I offered to do it though because I did have a little experience from last year with state machines, so thought I would have the least trouble with it. I don’t know if Colin would’ve done it faster, probably would’ve, but after seeing how he does his other scripts I think I would be horrified to try make sense of a state machine written by him. It was hard enough for me to understand what I had to do for my own. I think part of the reason it was harder than it should’ve been was because Colin and I were programming scripts that needed to interact with each other separately and making them work on their own before putting them together much later. Not many of our scripts needed to reference each other, but it probably would have helped me to structure some areas of the state machine quicker/easier had I known the variables and methods he was using to pretend to be a state machine. I remember my dad telling me we should make a dictionary or whatever you call it, where we put the variables we each will use so we can know how to make them interact. I forgot about that, so we didn’t do it.
Overall, very stressful last year. I’ve learned a lot through all this self-study and collaboration, and I think it will help me a lot when making my own games, whether that’s as a job or in my own time. It has been a pleasure working in this group and seeing the fruits of our labour come to fruition.