Post 11

This post marks the end of the "Minimum Viable Product" (MVP) stage, and marks the beggining of the polish and stretch goal stage.

The past ten posts covered a very rough period of development. This project saw me learning several new skills and software in order to attempt something that I have never done before; I have never modded any game before, let alone RimWorld. The time spent on this project was incredibly stressful; there were many weeks where massive roadblocks, such as the Titan AI and Subject Of Ymir functionality, caused me to unnecessarily sink time and effort into aspects of work that I couldn't complete. Whenever I came across such a roadblock, I would become frustrated, and push forwards into it, sinking more and more time into a single task. Whereas at the time, I thought it would work, and that I could burn through a task easily enough, I realised eventually that this was not the case. Taking a step back, and finding other, easier tasks to do was a clear-cut way to progress and develop my skills with XML elsewhere, that way I could return to a struggling task later with a more refined skill set. As such, the past ten posts worth of work can be seen in two ways.

The first is a stressful project, that whilst I ultimately dedicated and sunk a substantial amount of time into, felt rough to complete.

The other is as a learning experience, which from my perspective feels invaluable. So far I have learned workflow valuable skills that, in all honesty, should have been hammered into my skill set years ago, one such being the ability to pull back the scope on a project and not over-scope myself. Alongside this, being further aware of my personal skillset, and not only what skills I do possess within game development but also the skills that I do not, and therefore what tasks to avoid assigning myself, very quickly became a hard-learned lesson. But alongside these more workflow-orientated skills came new hard skills, such as learning how to use, read and write an entirely new programming language in the form of XML, how modding works for games in general and how to decompile games and learn more about the inner machinations of the software itself.

Personally, I feel that being able to develop skills that exist outside of my standard workflow, (Unity, Probuilder, ETC,) is a great change for me. It allows me to learn and develop a skill set that I can use for personal projects moving forwards: whilst this project has been very stressful so far I intend to, once it is finished, continue creating and developing mods for RimWorld alongside the rest of my studies and work. Modding RimWorld is fun, and I enjoy the process of learning and developing new skills, even if the process under a deadline can be stressful. Continuing to mod RimWorld in a hobbyist nature is something I am looking forward to after the completion of this project.

This shows an evaluation of the past near-dozen weeks working on this project, and a conclusion of the MVP stage of development. The next stage I am working on will be the aforementioned polish and stretch goal stage.