Week 2

A Faulty Workflow

Even with the basic workflow requirements of this weeks projects, ITs gotten me thinking about an interesting problems, both in general and specific to me. As weve moved on from working in class and gone to communicating through slack, its becoming increasingly apparent that without a strong design and agreement on that design, its almost impossible to get any work done. From a personal standpoint, this is going to be hard from me, because my general workflow can be generously described as “sloppy”. I joked in class that I have a problem just reading the first line in the directions and moving on before understanding the whole thing, but that does in some sense describe my worflow and its REALLY bitten me in the butt recently. Last semester that shotgun approach ruined me a bit in basic algorithms, as Id just go for it and then hours in the design that I had been “Just going with” was fundamentally flawed from the start. Had I worked it out further on paper or something before hand, I could have saved myself plenty of grief. Even more so with additional people involved, If you dont know what you want, you basically CANT do work without the fear that itll end up being something that the end design doesnt actually call for. This is especially interesting to me as its something thats pervasive in the games industry where I want to end up. There was a post-mortem of a recent big name game “Anthem” where its pretty apparent this was a huge problem. There was talk of making the “Bob Dylan” of video games but with no ACTUAL ideas or direction. Design input was basically “Work on… something until we come up with something for you to do”.

TLDR: A stitch in time saves nine when it comes to design.

Written before or on February 10, 2020