Programming:

As this was the first game jam I had ever participated in, let alone in a group, I felt severely overwhelmed with the whole prospect. When I was assigned as the main programmer for the game, I honestly felt anxious and scared. I had never programmed for a project this big, and fears of disappointing the entire group loomed in my mind.

However, as the game jam progressed, I slowly became more and more confident with my skills and potential.

One of the most important things I learned while programming an entire game was to start small and tackle tasks in a sequential order. Essentially, don’t look at coding the entire package, code the building blocks that you then fit together.

The project as a whole was a "game where the player must move from lane to lane, avoiding the boss's attack that comes on the beat while picking up ammo to attack the boss with before needing to press a button on the beat to attack.”

However, I approached the project starting like this: “OK, let’s start with just coding the player moving from lane to lane.” After that part was complete, it became “OK, let’s code in a projectile that spawns at the end of the lane and travels down it.” Then “OK, now let’s have those projectiles randomly spawn on random lanes.”

As I continued this main thought process, slowly adding in more bits and pieces of the game, I eventually realized that the once-feared gameplay was now mostly completely before I even realized it.

Was it the perfect code? No. Did this process result in messy code that required many hours of bug fixing? Yes. Did I gain confidence in myself and realize that I could tackle big projects like this in the future again? Yes.