What I Learned - 1

I have something to confess.  My dutiful addition to this blog has been… sub-par, to say the least.

But, I've found some things to keep me on track!  One is to play more games; I hope to have more of my “I would include this mechanic/technique in my games; I would fix these issues in this game” posts.

Another is a weekly posting of “What I Learned” in my everyday experience as a game designer for the past week.  These posts will concern game mechanics, game development, programming, and visual design.  And this is the first such post.

What I learned

1.  For a professional concept/industrial designer, 2 days of thumbnail sketching work equals approximately 144 thumbnails, or 72 pictures in an 8-hour day, or 1 sketch per 6-7 minutes.
1. Scott Robertson, Start Your Engines
2. Keeping contingency plans active, especially in the roller-coaster job market of the industry, is very, very useful.
1. Time prior to leaving Secure Banking Solutions.
3. Pseudo Code is more amazing than I ever learned before; transmitting ideas between designers and programmers is a must, and can be undertaken by a programmer with a designer background, or a designer with a practical understanding of coding.
1. Figuring out how weapons will work in an unannounced game.
4. Coroutines and states are the saving graces of Unity game programming (learn about them!).
1. Rich Joslin, UnityPDX WWW Class Presentation
5. Testing AI is super simple; write functions that would do the animations, move the character, fire, etc, but only display console logs as to the action it should be taking based on what the player is doing.
1. Thinking on how to implement an enemy time (now time to do it).

That wasn't too bad, was it?  Expect this to be a regular thing.  But in the meantime, I need to start on re-imagining the style of this blog...

If you can suggest anything that I could learn from, please, do share below!