GameDevHQ Intensive Training Program — 04 — What a ride!
Well, I’ve just finished week 8 of GameDevHQ’s Intensive Training Program and wasn’t it aptly named?! Once things got going they really got going, and I found myself without the time or energy to spare for documenting my journey. (Admittedly, the fact that it turned out a slow gas leak was happening under my window didn’t help matters — turns out your brain doesn’t process so well when you poison it for a couple of weeks.)
It was a great course, though, and I learned a lot both about optimal programming techniques — we had a whole week dedicated exclusively to optimisation and profiling, as well as a heavy emphasis on it all the way through — and about developing a game under pressure. I’ve learned the joy of events, which I will probably write whole article about soon. I’ve learned how using them indiscriminately can really mess things up (which might be a whole other article!). I’ve learned how to lean on coroutines to pull things out of the Update() loop. And I’ve learned a lot about reaching out to my peers when I get stuck rather than continually beating my head against the wall trying to solve it myself.
This is probably actually the most valuable lesson I’m taking away from the course. The programming side of things I can learn in any number of places, including GameDevHQ’s excellent selection of on-demand courses. But knowing when to reach out, that it’s okay to reach out, that people won’t look down on you because you’ve hit a struggle-point… that is absolute gold. Because you know what? Every single one of them has run into situations where they’ve struggled to get something working. And the Unity Developer community (at least, the bits of it I’ve come in contact with so far) seems to be really big on paying it forward.
So what’s next? While I polish up my online presence in preparation for job hunting, I’ve entered into a 2-week Game Jam with a fellow ITP alumni. I’m looking to do a better job of documenting the things I learn over the journey, both in terms of coding and in terms of working in a small team rather than on a solo project. So watch this space!
