As part of the 3rd bachelor year’s curriculum, students of the Games Programming section of the school are tasked with creating a video-game over the span of 7 months (end of september to end of april). We settled on the creation of a city builder we’ve named Voliday which can be found here: https://volcanoteam.itch.io/.
During this project I had to communicate a lot while working in the team, for different purposes.
I worked as a programmer during this project and we had meetings on a weekly basis, where we would present the progress we made during the week to the rest of the team and then to our professor, the stakeholder. We would then receive our task for the next week. And one thing I used to have trouble with was figuring out where and in what scope I had to implement each feature, especially when multiple programmers working on it and I’m not aware of all of the code being used.
To solve this I spent more time aking about specific details about the task right when it’s assigned to me so that I’m able to start the implementation right away without getting stuck or slowed down early in the process.
I then had to share my progress with the rest of the team during our weekly meetings. We made presentations for this, and I wasn’t used to used to present my progress that way unless I had something finished or something visual to present.
What helped me improve this is the daily messages we used to share what we did on the project everyday. It helped me getting used to the process of communicating what I did and participating more frequently in these exchanges.
I sometimes had to ask for help on some tasks, and I learned to do it more often during the project. Because I understood how valuable and effective it is while deciding myself way more than when being told to ask for help. I even had some interesting conversations about how we should implement a feature, sharing ideas and figuring out the best way to do it.
This project was an opportunity to challenge myself on communication in a team for a group project. I improved my communication skills by getting used to these team dynamics and setting up new habits for me to make sure I’m able to start working when I’m given a task, to present my work in a clear way and finally to not hesitate before asking for help more often.