There’s a saying that I’ve heard a lot when doing animation work, which is “We’ll fix it in post.”

It’s one of those things that people say when a problem pops up during production, but it’s too much trouble to fix in order to meet a deadline. So “we’ll fix it in post” means that the problem gets pushed down the line to post-production, where last-minute changes have to be forced or thrown together.

I’ve found this concept to be pretty common in software development as well. When design for a piece of software isn’t fully fleshed out from the start, you’re more likely to stumble into unexpected problems. And the easy thing is to always say “we’ll figure it out later.”

While this is sometimes necessary, I find it’s often a costly decision in the long run. Things that should be resolved get pushed along until there is no choice left in the matter. Sometimes the quicker, last-minute solution isn’t the best one. Sometimes it’s better to take the time and figure things out from the start.

When getting into a big project, it’s easy to feel like you want to skip ahead to the “fun” parts, or to put off the smaller details. Ultimately, however, it’s harder to succeed when you don’t first establish your goals and all of the finer details that will guide the rest of the process. As much as software developers (myself included) love to dive into coding, developing a blueprint (i.e. a thorough design document) is going to benefit you in the long run. Every step of the development process is important – even the ones that aren’t quite as interesting on the surface.

Ever since I was young, I’ve had a strong fondness for movies and video games. It’s the reason why I wanted to be an animator. Frankly, it’s something I would also love to do with my Computer Science degree.

Although I have experience with all of the work involved in animation, I ended up being most interested in a specialization called “rigging.” Rigging involves building the foundation of making a character or object able to move – not dissimilar to our own skeletons and muscles. The thing about rigging is that there is actually quite a bit of programming involved. Instructions on how to build a skeleton, where to place things, what size they need to be, how they should move – it can all be written as code in any given 3D program.

That is what led me here, to studying Computer Science at OSU. I found out that I really coding. That I love doing all the foundational work to build amazing programs or content. Big or small. I really love building things that people can enjoy, either for a moment, or a few hours, or every day. That’s the stuff that I want to do, whatever format it might be.

I’ve been working with my Capstone group for a couple weeks now. When we were looking through the list of available Capstone projects, the Text Based Adventure Game leapt out to all three of us, so we teamed up. And while there were quite a few projects I would have been thrilled to work on, I admit I’m pretty excited about the one we chose. I’d really like to make a decent game that I can use as a portfolio piece at the end of this term.

We’re through the third week of the term, and so far we’ve been putting time to the design of our game. I have spent a lot of time learning how to craft stories in my previous work, so I feel like this has come in handy. We’re creating a game with a haunted house theme, and I’m looking forward to how it continues to develop.