Production Post 1 : A New Team

Before now, I hadn't worked with more than one other programmer on a game. Now, halfway through the project with a codebase I wrote, the lovely Abner, Vasily, and Will have joined the team. This makes me the de-facto lead programmer, a role I am not terribly familiar with but am quickly getting used to. What this really means is I have a few more responsibilities, and a bit more work to do than usual.

For one I have to, in certain ways, manage the programming team. I am completely confident in Abner, Vasily, and Will to get their work done on their own, but I have to make sure we all have tasks to be working on, and I have to make sure the tasks are divvied up fairly and according to their skillsets when applicable. Our first task was to make 4 different movement styles for the dragon, all of which are predicted to be in the game. The first thing we did to make this happen was to fix the tail that I had hacked together months ago. It worked "fine," but any change in speed would have to be accompanied by manually changing this variable called "power" through trial-and-error to some arbitrary value so the tail wouldn't drift apart. The first work session went, I think, fairly smoothly for a first work session with an unfamiliar codebase. Will had a fix in mind that I did not agree would work, and I had a fix in mind, so Will and over-the-shoulder Abner worked together on that fix while over-the-shoulder Vasily and I worked on my fix. About an hour later, mine worked and Will's didn't, which was to be expected considering I wrote the code to begin with.

Unfortunately, about an hour of that 2.5 hour session was spent with essentially everyone watching me program since that work was blocking everyone else from working. I see this as a failure on my part, but now I know going into the next session that I need to be sure there is no pipeline block like that.

The next work session went a lot better. We all sat at our own computers, all working in tandem on our respective movement schemes. There was a point where we were all actually trying to solve the same problem: converting touch position in screen pixel coordinates to 3D world coordinates. Abner found a great solution for getting the proper z-axis coordinates, and we all used it.

As far as lead programmer responsibilities go, I am also responsible for making sure we have proper build numbers and making a changelog every week. I also want to make it clear that all four of us have an equal say: if there is dispute over how we should approach a problem we will discuss it and reach a unanimous decision. I'd say we are all about equally competent programmers: the main thing I will be doing as lead programmer is scheduling work sessions, taking large tasks and breaking them up into smaller tasks, making sure everyone always has something to do, and writing up documents. Fun! I'm looking forward to seeing the technical achievements we can accomplish with four programmers!