This week was a bit of a doozy! Now that we’re in the second half of the quarter, I feel like time is really going to start flying by. We got the very basics of our introductory scene up and running, and I gotta tell you – whenever I finish a really difficult section of a project, I’ve always felt that little boost of confidence and pride. I’m sure you’re familiar with the feeling: you’ve spent a decent chunk of time barely making any headway, and eventually you get some sort of burst of inspiration or something just clicks in your head and you’re like, oh dang I got it! That is definitely how I felt this week! But seeing our game come together in a proper scene was a new kind of confidence booster.

I definitely think part of it is because somewhere deep down, I didn’t think I’d be able to contribute anything to a project like this. My goal last week was to figure out how to set up this dialogue system, and I was really stressing out. My group wanted to have at least a portion of the introductory scene with the mom functioning properly, so that we could demonstrate a bit of the voice recognition part of our project. I knew I had to get it done as soon as possible, but towards the end of last week, I was still only watching tutorials and getting worried about not figuring it out in time. I found it really hard to motivate myself (which I discussed in my last post), but at a certain point, I said “screw it” and sat down and actually tried to make some progress. It took a good day or so, but lo and behold, after following a handful of videos and testing out a couple of different examples, I was able to get it working the way I wanted it to!

So by the time I met with my team on Monday, I had the entire intro conversation working, and it turns out that they really only expected me to complete one voice recognition exchange (whoops haha), but they were impressed with how quickly I was able to get most of it working (yay!). My only issue was getting the voice recorder to wait for a response before continuing onto the next sentence. I originally used a while loop to call the voice recorder function so that the player could keep trying until they answered with the correct word/phrase. The first time I tried it, it wouldn’t stop recording. After making use of some other helper functions, I tried again and the dialogue would continue onto the next sentence without waiting for the voice recorder to finish recording, then the game would freeze. Luckily, Angel was able to figure out that we needed to put the voice recognition function directly into our dialogue script instead of our NPC script. Thank goodness for teammates!

All of this was to say that I really surprised myself this week when I came through for my team. I know a lot of us struggle with imposter syndrome and sometimes that keeps us from trying something even just once. However, that first try might just be the motivation you need to keep going. I didn’t really think about it like this before this week, but now I feel like the only way I’ll truly conquer the whole imposter syndrome thing is if I continue to try new things and test my limits. I had my doubts about being able to contribute enough to my team, but getting over this week’s hurdle made me feel a little better regarding that.