For the past 15 weeks I've managed to not write about one of the best learning experience I've had in my college career: developing a game, full-time, with twelve other students. I'm disappointed in myself, but to be fair, this semester has been kind of a blur. Commuting an hour each way every day and working on only one project this semester —no standard classes, no homework, no tests — has been a mentally exhausting process. It has been challenging, but it is a near perfect conclusion to my time at Ball State University, and I'll look back on my time at the Virginia Ball Center very, very fondly.
I sat in my car after quittin' time one day this past week, soaking it all in. It's hard to believe that soon I will graduate college and dive into the new job, my wife and I will move into our first home, and we will welcome our first child into the world. It all has come so quickly, and I've tried to absorb as much of it as I can, even if sometimes it feels like I'm trying to grab a hold of a passing train.
With production of the game complete, the members of Root Beer Float Studio took an academic look at what we've learned this semester. Many, many concepts were mentioned during our time-boxed 50 minutes, the topics ranging from technical skills to the more transferable skills, such as communication and commitment. All of the students took different things away from this experience, which is one of the great things about the teaching capabilities of what Ball State calls "Immersive Learning": a group of people can take part in one project, but come away with wildly different skills and abilities.
The four graduating Computer Science students involved with the project, including myself, discussed what we took away from this semester. One of the bigger pluses of this experience was being able to have a real-world software development experience without the fear of financial repercussions for failure. We also noted that we learned a lot about ourselves; I, myself, learned as much about what makes me tick as I did about C# or test-driven development. Speaking of TDD, we noted that at a point in the semester we, as a group, abandoned it. Much of that had to do with the Unity3D environment being a pain to test, but the four of us agreed that we would be more vigilant in our professional careers to hold true to best-practices. It's great that this experience has us asking these questions, questions of professionalism and commitment.
This morning I was reading a blog post by Jeff Atwood, titled Trust Me, I'm Lying. In it, he talks about absolute honesty as a way of avoiding white lies and building stronger relationships. As I was reading his post, I realized that I could generalize nearly all of my non-technical take-aways from this semester into a single word: honesty. Being honest about commitments that I don't truly plan on fulfilling, being honest about what I think of the music in the game, being honest about how someone isn't being accountable: these all are areas that absolute honesty could have benefited the project and the people working on it. Sure, it helps to tell white lies to avoid hurting feelings, but I wonder if being 100% truthful would've avoided some of the pitfalls we fell into.
There are a lot of life-long lessons that I've learned this semester, most of which I won't even realize for a considerable amount of time. I know this semester has prepared me well for the demands of full-time employment, such as what 40 to 50 hour work weeks feel like. I've experienced hours of sitting in front of a work computer, as well as stressful team collaboration, but I've come through the other side a stronger person.
If you would like to read more about the game(check out the team blog!), or even play it(!), check out this page:
Design an Exhibit home page.
