PeaceIsland
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So- one of the things I didn't anticipate...
🕑 Added 2019-09-12 22:54:16 +0000 UTC...was how, as activity on the Peace Island project ramped up, my individual role would become more supervisory, than hands-on...
It's quite a change - for about a year and a half, If we needed something done, It was either up to Myself, Laura, or Alex - our programmer in Greece. In a given day, I'd have to jump from one aspect of development to another about a dozen times:
In the morning, I'd be working with IK motors. By lunchtime, I'd have moved on to constructing & revising buildings. At 2, I'd be adjusting more abstract visual stuff such as foliage placement, and sunset colors. When dinner came around, It was on to a bit of landscaping, followed by an hour of working on fur shaders and textures. If we were lucky, we could occasionally get a writer's meeting in before I had to do some bug hunting. I finished off the day with adding a few dozen props.
Now, the majority of my day is spent simply making sure that everyone understands what they need to be doing:
Are animations still coming in? Check.
Are AWS & Perforce getting their acts together? Check.
Character controller looking better? Check.
How about the new fur textures? Check.
Does everyone have the software they need? Check.
How is the AI Looking? Are we making progress on sectorizing? Check.
How about those premiums - are they getting packaged up? Check- but out of the 200-plus Patrons who are eligible for postcard sets, only about 25 have supplied their mailing addresses! This means we need to send out 190 individual appeals, over the next few days...
All in all, as our staff is still quite modest, it's a relatively easy roster of activity to keep track of - but when our versioning system goes up in about 48 hours, things will be going into overdrive.
WE EVEN FOUND SOMEONE WHO WILL BE ABLE TO WORK ON A STABLE MAC ALPHA PORT - We haven't forgotten you, Mac folks!
Now, over the next few weeks, I'm going to be gradually scaling back my updates here to weekly. This is primarily because, as stated above, we're about to bring our versioning system online. Once we have that up, progress on the project will be going into overdrive, and I'm going to have fewer and fewer opportunities to do these kinda reports.
So, the next time we talk, it'll be Tuesday - I have a feeling we'll have a LOT of news, by then!
Comments
Ah yes, getting work done through others is very very different from doing it yourself!
As a budding project manager/coordinator, I empathized with this post! It's definitely a shift in mindset, but it sounds like you're on the right track. But like David said above, a manager/supervisor with a clear vision who can keep his team going despite the hurdles is absolutely vital. And the payoff that is going to be this game will be incredible.
