PFD Week 1: Introduction to the Professional Development Skill

Introduction to the Professional Development Skill

Welcome to the first entry of my weekly blog, spanning over a minimum period of 2 months where I will develop my chosen professional skill and present it in the form of a concluding "mini project".

Chosen Skill

Firstly, the chosen skill I have chosen to professionally develop is:
Game Development through Team Collaboration

Justification

Developing this skill would be significant with relevance to my career choice. Personally, I want to be a games programmer as part of a studio of game developers, where I can specialise in programming while collaborating with my peers. This means that if I spend a minimum of 2 months developing this skill, I will be significantly more equipped for the industry compared to if I didn't pursue this whatsoever.

I believe this will be difficult, with the main reason being that this skill can easily be divided into 2 sub-skills. Not only do I need to be efficient at collaborating in a team, but I also need to have the game development skills necessary to contribute to the final project in the first place. As I'm more confident in my programming skills, I will spend the majority of this blog series talking about improving my team-based skills, and how I efficiently contributed my programming to the project.

Finding a Team

Before starting my skill development, I needed a small team of people that I could work with for the duration of this blog series. The ideal range for the size of this studio would be roughly less than 5 people, as anything more populated than that could require logistics too complex to run efficiently.

Luckily, a friend of mine was looking to found a studio to attempt to develop a game within a team. I presented my programming skills to him through previous projects on the itch.io platform which led to him deciding to accept me to work in the team. The team lead then pursued and acquired the following team members:

Programmer: An additional programmer to work closely alongside myself during the project.

3D Artist: A 3D artist with skills in modelling, texturing and UV unwrapping 3D objects. This choice also determines the game as 3-Dimensional.

Sound Engineer: A sound engineer with skills to create an OST for the project as well as SFX.

With myself as a programmer and the team lead being all-rounded, the studio was founded. As a contextual disclaimer, all members will only be committing part-time to the project as well as having no financial promises. This is a team almost entirely comprised of undergraduate students.

Anticipated Challenges

This could potentially raise an issue regarding the team being 5 people. With 5 people in the team, I anticipate that communication issues could arise and that I would need to prepare myself to overcome those issues. From this, I'm going to invest more time in communicating efficiently to the team, and help enforce frequent meetings to keep everyone on the same page.

Reflecting upon previous projects, communication is consistently one of the biggest challenges. In fact, the Agile Manifesto emphasises that "individuals and interactions over processes and tools" are key to success, which reinforces the need for open and regular communication within our team (Agile Alliance, 2001). This perspective further motivates us to ensure that everyone remains mentally synchronised throughout the project.

Initial Goals and Objectives

With this blog being merely the initialisation of the team, these are the following goals for the first week:

• Establish clear communication channels

• Develop a rough game concept 

• Set up an agile system for development

Kanban Methodology

Kanban is widely embraced in Agile and DevOps settings because it promotes real-time communication of team capacity and ensures complete transparency over tasks. By visually displaying work items on a board, every team member can immediately grasp the current status of each task, which helps streamline workflow management and boosts overall team collaboration. (Atlassian n.d.)

As a team, we decided to incorporate the Kanban Methodology for our projects. We initially discussed using Scrum where teams assign tasks to be completed within blocks of time, but decided against it due to the part-time commitment nature of most members in the team.

Executing this successfully will improve my employability skills as Agile methodologies are standard in the games industry when it comes to development.

Conclusion

In conclusion, a foundation has been laid out for the project and members have their defined roles. I'm confident in the future of this project and believe this will be very beneficial.

To continuously assess my progress, I plan to publish weekly reflective blogs where I state what succeeded, failed and what I've learned from those situations.


References

Atlassian (n.d.) Kanban. Available at: https://www.atlassian.com/agile/kanban (Accessed: 20 January 2025).

Agile Alliance (2001) Manifesto for Agile Software Development. Available at: https://agilemanifesto.org/ (Accessed: 20 January 2025).

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