Crustacean Nations Update 1

Where am I as a developer?

So far I've released a few projects I'm proud of. First, while working alone, I made a few game demos which actually ended up being pretty fun. See Supercharged and Splonk. However since I was working alone trying to develop an entire game, I've learned that this is an extreme amount of work to take on by myself. As a result, I've found my group projects like Cosmic Taxi a lot more fruitful. There is no shortage of people developing games at Champlain, so with a little effort I should have no problem finding people who want to work on personal projects in the future. Additionally, with Production 2 underway, my team and I are making some compelling prototypes and enjoying the process. Even with a team, though, I'm learning that managing time and prioritizing which features are important is critical to making a successful game or demo.

What are my skills?

Working on games solo before college helped me develop a specific skillset. With a few exceptions, I never really liked spending lots of time on any one project. Often times I would open up new projects to develop small demos or combine previously existing mechanics. This has translated into my current ability to deploy rapid prototypes and determine what actually makes the game fun. Moreover, I have no shortage of game and mechanic ideas, so concepting is another strong suit. This combined with my newer knowledge of good architectural practice and scalable code has given me all the tools necessary to see a project all the way through to completion.

Where am I going?

Unity is definitely my preferred engine due to how much time I've logged in Unity projects. This semester I'm beginning to learn Unreal in a graphics class, so I'm excited to work more in a different engine and expand my skillset. I recently learned that Blender is used in the industry somewhat often. This is great news to me, because I've spent lots of time learning how to model, texture, rig, and animate 3D characters in Blender while working solo. I've put this knowledge to use in the form of making interesting procedural animations, and I want to do much more of this in the future. Graphics and animation programming is currently my desired career track due to how much creativity is present in these forms of coding. I enjoy working with artists and designers to simplify implementation pipelines and to generally make cool-looking elements to our game. For this reason, I am looking forward to having another programmer on my team. I rarely have time to work on graphics in a team project since I am usually the only programmer, but having someone else to work on core mechanics will free up some time. If I end up working more on graphics for upcoming projects, you can expect to see a shader/animation portfolio on this website in the future.