Determined Weak Link

I've since taken the job at Red, and it was a fantastic choice. Right away I jumped into level designing for a Cut-The-Rope clone game for the San Diego Zoo, which should be releasing to the app store within a month. Red focuses on fun, and frequently their clients pay up-front for a game without any monetization at all, so our job is exclusively to make the game as fun as we can. It's a dream come true.

After spending a few weeks designing all the levels for the SDZoo game (I was the only level designer, so I'm quite excited to see people's reaction to the game), I switched projects and jumped onto Onwords, a Match3/Hangman mashup for Oprah. I'm working on a team with Chris Rawson, who I worked with on Cyber Heist during grad school at the University of Utah. The promise of working with Chris again was one of the major draws to the job here in the first place, and Chris does not disappoint.

Chris is a very inspiring and extremely talented person. His work ethic is tremendous, and he's frequently the first person into the studio in the morning and occasionally even the last one out. His art background gives him a great eye for visual aesthetics and he frequently uses his art skills to help improve the games he works on, with or without another artist. Most impressive, however, is his command of code and knack for architecture while laying out the foundations of a game.

It's this that made me want to post in the first place. I don't have a degree in engineering and I'm far behind Chris' experience, which makes life hard and feel like I'm always catching up. Fortunately, Chris is pretty patient with me in explaining what I need to know in code structures that I haven't encountered before, but it puts me into a situation that I'm not really used to: Being the weakest person on the team.

Being the weak link is very challenging, especially when we're looking into tasks to divide up. I have to decide what I'm capable of when assigning myself to tasks, and many times I don't have a full knowledge of how to even accomplish the task. I regularly code-review with Chris to see what kinds of things I can do better and how I can improve, but sometimes it feels like it might be faster for Chris to have done the work himself from the beginning. In the end I definitely contribute, but it can be painful to divide the tasks up for a sprint based on what I'm not currently capable of doing.

It's certainly a different kind of challenge than I'm used to, and I'm learning to be more patient with myself and more determined. It's very difficult, but I'm really enjoying the work. Fortunately, I really feel like I'm picking it up quickly and I'm already contributing a lot, despite the setbacks from my lack of coding background.