Always Treading Water
Sometimes it feels like everyone besides my teammates are conspiring to keep me back or slow me down; be it my job, my kids, their mother, my health. I’m always taking deep calming breaths throughout the day, wondering if I’m ever going to make any progress. Fortunately, the deep breathing still seems to help.
The software that we’re using (Unity) is really packed with numerous features. This can be a blessing and a curse, especially for new users of the program who are in a bit of a time crunch. I think everyone in our team seems grounded in their capabilities and what is and isn’t possible in our time frame. It still seems so overwhelming to tread through all the settings. I spent too much time on graphical elements of the program (we’re building a game after all) that I now have to focus on the script-writing that needs to be done for our game elements to behave/work properly.
I hit my first mental block as it wasn’t entirely clear to me how to tie the C# scripts to the game elements we were building. The Unity Editor presents a unique development environment wherein you can drag and drop a multitude of things for ease. Game elements can be dragged into user-programmed fields of scripts. Scripts can be dragged into game elements as components. When I’m faced with a plethora of ways to do any particular task, I tend to freeze up in indecision. It’s a terrible quirk of my psyche that I’m learning to control. I focused on the scripting tutorials supplied by Unity and built my first script a small chunk at a time in baby steps. Luckily, that seemed to do the trick and started opening up my understanding of what might be the most difficult task of our project. If anything, it will probably end up being the most labor-intensive task – writing the C# scripts needed to power the logic and behavior of our game and its elements.
