This sprint, we finished up tasks necessary for the Alpha build of our game. My tasks involved completing the functionality of all UI in the game and implementing it into the main build. While I finished most of this, I was not really ready for the latter and had to stay up a bit late making sure that all my UI was implemented properly into the build. Thankfully it all worked, but this leaves something to think about with how I function in the team. Are you a trusted member of the team and the studio?
I believe that I am a trusted member of the team and studio. This is not to say that I do not have flaws, I certainly would be more trustworthy if I got my work done sooner, but I am always open to feedback. When others tell me something I should do for the week or something I could be doing better, I will follow through.
How do you make positive and professional contribution to the team and the studio?
I try my best to always smile and bring energy to the team, even if things look bad. In a professional capacity, I make sure to post my work in gifs to try and show the work I'm doing and it's functionality. A secondary purpose is to also get people motivated by showing work getting done.
How do you conduct yourself as a professional in and out of the classroom?
I make sure that in meetings and conversations with my team members that I stay on topic. While all of us on the team enjoy small quips to laugh and keep ourselves in a positive mood, especially myself, we do get a lot of cross-disciplinary communication and work done during meetings, so I'd say we do a good job of this.
How are your contributions of this individual moving the team forward? Are you doing so at an anticipated pace and at a level of quality expected by the team?
I think that in the beginning, I struggled with providing useful work to the team. But when I started tackling more and more prototypes for different game elements, I felt like I was actually was very often contributing useful work to the team. However, with this alpha build, it has become evident that a lot more of my work needs to be integrated one step at a time instead of all at once.
What challenges have you had so far this semester? How do you plan on improving?
Late work, late work, LATE WORK. While my impediments, such as preparing for the Elevator Pitch Competition, have often excused the majority of my work, there is definitely more effort I could put in to prevent a majority my work being done on Thursday night.
Are you contributing to maintaining an inclusive and supportive work environment?
I try to. I always make sure I am not running over others when I talk. This includes gathering feedback when I ask about any design decisions I make. I think my next step this semester is to back up, take a look at my workflow, and evaluate who is involved in my work so I can talk to them more often.
Lastly... 3 Goals!
FRONT-LOADING WORK
Daily Checking-In on others in Discord
Ironing out a workflow
Front Loaded Work
In coming weeks, I want to get an hour worth of tasks done each day of a sprint. This way, even if I'm getting everything done on Thursday, it'll be a small enough chunk of work that could be in the morning, before our presentation work is due. And this way, I can hopefully have no tasks rejected by the end of the semester.
Daily Check-Ins
I want to check in on my team more, to promote communication and clarity. It seems some of us, very much including myself here, push a lot of work to the later end of a sprint. I think something that would promote us to work harder and earlier would be to check-in with each other early in the week. Or at least personally, I'll ask specific people in our team Discord how their work is going and see if they have any questions or anything they can bring to the team.
Ironing Out Team Workflows
I want to help my team dodge unnecessary dependency on each other. So many times on our team we have had to rely on another to explain how to do something or to complete something. Generally this causes impediments, and I think if I create some possible guides and workflows for game content and features we will run into less issues like this.
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