VR&R

A house keeping training simulator designed to teach without verbal ques.

[[VIDEO CURRENTLY UNDER CONSTRUCTION]]

The experience gained on this production has completely changed how I will come to approach projects in future.

We gained and lost workers. In some cases the losses included team leads. Other times we gained a major player at the critical time.

The trick was learning how to keep the team communicating with one another and mitigating loss along the way.

Management Tools

So much or what I did related to goal setting and tracking.

Personally being "middle of the pack" with my technical skills helped our team find a middle ground with time estimates.

Having a working knowledge of the time it took myself to accomplish 3D modeling and 2D asset creation served as a basis for setting goals for our asset creators.

The time I took to do research on code became the standard allotted time for coding research.

Testing

When managing a project I am the primary tester.

Testing allows me to have a first hand experience of the progress we've made.

If a programmer is struggling, testing allows them the chance to explain what they're doing to me, letting them have a sounding board and making it easier to problem solve.

Being proficient at Texturing, 3D Modelling, Animation, and having a basic knowledge of programming helps, but testing also allows me the opportunity to do research and continue to flesh out my knowledge of the technical side of things.

Lessons Learned

If I were to start this whole project over from scratch, there is so much that I would have done differently.

The primary difference being how and where to set mile markers.

From here our on productions, functionality comes first. Art then revolves around the needs of the programmers.

If functionality is addressed from the get go, the art department will know exactly what the urgent needs are from the get go.

I cannot stress the importance of gray boxing.

The gray boxing method also allows for early testing.

The need for a clean, organized repository is perhaps the clearest message I have gotten out of this production.

In the final weeks of the production we didn’t know who had the most up to date build.

That would not have happened had we been utilizing GitHub as intended from the beginning.

Needless to say, the entire production has completely revolutionized the way I approach projects from the get go, and was well worth every pitfall and stumbling block.