Overview:
If you have been following along with my blog post, you’ll quickly realize how much time has passed since my last post. It has been 3 months since my last post, and in that time a lot of work was done on the capstone project, many items refactored, and still much more development to come. Instead of talking about technical details, I’d like to reflect on the past weeks and what I’ve learned in that time about my own development.
Why I Haven’t Made Blog Posts:
Blog posting had never been in my mind until starting this project. If you read the first blog, you’ll recall that I had the idea to make consistent blog posts from a close friend. Both my friend and I fell into the same pitfall: not keeping up with the blog posts and slowly letting them fade away. I’m sure that this isn’t unique to us. It is so easy to let other higher ticket items become a priority. We need to program certain features in the game, the art has to be polished, game design documents need to be updated, and the list goes on. The point is, blog posts have fallen to the back of my mind, to the point of forgetting them completely for a time. But after some self-reflection, I have realized the importance of my blog post, and the original intentions I had when first starting them.
The Importance of Consistency
Reflecting on my progress through the capstone project has brought something interesting to my attention. When I was consistently making blog posts, I was a more active learner, programmer, and developer in general. My blog posts helped me to organize my thoughts and calculate the next moves to make. I was able to see a clearer picture of what should be prioritized, and how much time to spend on certain features. My blog posts sparked in person conversations that helped me to design more intuitive systems and find solutions to issues that others had come across as well.
Most importantly, blog posting had helped me to reflect on my decisions. Reflection is hugely important to see what decisions have helped me the most. Reflection helped me to realize that I wasn’t writing the blog post only for you, the reader, but also for myself. For these reasons, I will move blog posting up on the ever growing list of priorities I have.
Moving Forward:
For my next blog posts I plan to free write, at least a bit everyday just to keep myself in check. That way, my post will build up slowly over the week and I can see more intricate development. In terms of programming, I have more work to do on the AI. Most of the tasks for the behavior trees are done, so now it comes down to tying together the AI with the rest of the game. I am sure other variables will arise that cause problems, and so I will be discussing those issues in the next post.