Experience on working with fellow game development students

It is given that experience is the best teacher when it comes to improving oneself towards his/her own personal goal. As it is also given that working with other people with the same interest provides a sense of belongingness, as well as job satisfaction. So how about we combine them both and create a simulation of a game development team working towards a project, will it provide a good insight as well as satisfaction towards this career I'm pursuing? absolutely yes.

I-in-ICS Project was the first group project I had ever since enrolling in this college program, as it was a requirement for the course - software engineering needed to be completed. Since this is a team-based project, I am aware that different roles will be given to split up the work to be done in a short period of time and also on how crucial those roles are affecting the overall progression of the project completion. However, I'm oblivious enough to overlook the mistakes I've made along the way, especially the fact that I had poor communication skills. 

Despite this, I was given the role of back-end programming for the game using SQLite and was able to work through it. I actually failed to actually grasp how the game's progression work, so I had to remake the database multiple times because I did not bother to raise or ask any questions to clarify some variables that link the game with the database I am working on. Resulting in a major waiting game until I was able to come up with an operational database that was linked to the game so that the QA tester were able to start the testing phase. In the end, we were able to pull off all the necessary functions into making the game fully functional in a crunch time; albeit the fact that there are still some lacking features in the games mainly because of time constraint. 

Neon Shapes Project was the final requirement from the last game development course in which the entire class will be involved and undoubtedly, proved how important it is as one of the key points in team-based game development and how much it will affect the overall progression of the project's completion. So, what is this key point you may ask? It is passion, the collective passion where everyone wants to make a fun and entertaining game.

Even though each and every member of the group had level up their own individual skills and had better communication and had constant feedback among the peers. As shown from the screenshot above, there were definitely cracks that can be observed and was criticize especially on how bland the game feels like. As it is what everyone in the team felt at the end of the day, specifically, on the leading team in which I was given the role to supervise.

I felt the immense pressure from the expectation given to me to govern the entire game production mainly because I am the only one that has more free time to do so while everyone had their own internship to attend. 

I felt a heavy guilt deep inside me because the only thing I did throughout the entire process is just making the UI/UX of the game and waiting for the compilation of each subgroup's code and perform a QA test for it every time after merging it to the main branch using GitHub desktop.

I felt the internal struggle relentlessly that there is a problem with the subgroup's output because miscommunication tends to happen, and I have to resort to bothering other active members to help in solving the piling issues.

All these factors will not be experienced throughout the entire progression if we had that passion to bypass all the negative factors and look for different ways on how to solve it. However, the last setback was that the client appointed to the team for the game production project is a professor we had a long history with. That last factor destroyed the motivation left for the team members to fully invest on this project, resulting to this half-baked output just to make a statement.

These two projects I had in working with fellow game development students gave a lot of interesting experience and insights on how a game is being generated and published to the public. Despite having the tools and skills to use it, a game will not be fun and entertain without the passion that allows the developer to create a miracle that touches anybody and their lives.