Carrying the Load.

There has thankfully only one time so far that I felt like I had to carry a team. It was during my second project in Game History and Development and going into it I had high hopes. My first team and project were amazing and I assumed that things would stay this way moving into his new project. However, I was sadly unacquainted with reality at the time and that project turned into one of the worst team experiences of my life. Mainly because it felt like only myself and one of the designers actually cared about the project so we were the only ones putting in work. We were the ones coming up the main ideas for the game, doing all the research, figuring out the game loop, solving bugs, etc. Even when we had to go outside our comfort zones, like when we needed art assets for the game, it felt more like dictating ideas to the artist rather than them coming up with them on their own.

Now I could put this on apathy alone, that would be somewhat unfair to them seeing how I could have done more to make the team feel more cohesive. For starters, I defiantly made one of the designers I had feel useless by not giving him anything to work on, seeing how I and the other designer had already taken most of it. That would have definitely taken the load off of us and give him a greater stake in the game. Second, our meeting schedule could have been more solid and better adhered to. As it stood, our meetings were either to far off in the week to be useful or too late at night to get the best energy out of people. Lastly, a better working agreement and understanding could have helped immensely. I should have started that project by detailing what I and the team expected out of each other each week so we understood the workload from the get-go and where everyone’s talents could be applied.

In the end, it really comes down to the fact that I was just grasping at straws during that first year, not really knowing what to do or what to say and just doing any work that got left behind. Witch in retrospect is something I did again this project for a brief period, only to a less drastic extent. However, either way, its something that I need to outgrow, I have to let people fail if they are not doing work while at the same time letting other people, myself included, do what they do best. And hampering on extra work isn’t going to help either of those, its just going to bog me or someone else down and ruin the whole project. So going forward I’m going to be watching myself, and try and sidestep that pitfall again.