I have not been in this state, college, or community for very long, and I have yet to explore everything Arizona has to offer. Still, there are groups in and out of the school that I have/would like to have involvement in, and as a game programming major, it’s difficult to find a good one for me. One of the groups I have found, however, is Team NT Studios here at UAT.

            I’ve known about the group and their projects ever since I enrolled at UAT, and hearing about the close-knit machine of people they’ve become really made me intrigued to find out more. It just so happened that my schedule for this semester includes Game Studios, where I would work with a group on a project in order to learn how to work in a professional environment, and to my pleasure I found myself accepted into the NT Lab with their latest project.

            I’m an amateur in every sense of the word when it comes to game development. Sure, I can write movement scripts, create a base project with few assets, and even make a “game” by its lowest definition, but I had never worked in a team so organized as Team NT. Every second of the development process is logged, discussed, reworked, and made public to everyone on the team. We all know our own duties, yet still help others if they feel stuck. I remember a time when I was waiting for Unity to load and three designers were talking about a design problem with the project. I piped in and helped them rework what they needed, and gave a personal insight into the look from being more of an outsider than anyone else in the room. It’s a thrilling time working with this group, and while projects, problems, and programs can whiz by so quickly, I somehow manage to stay on top of things and get my assignments done on time.

            Granted, I am still a beginner when it comes to working in a big team like this, so the first step for me was to understand how the project functioned and how I could change what I needed to change within the project and its code. So far, I believe I understand how the forefathers of this project have coded it, and am slowly leaving my touch on things while I fix bugs and implement new features. The programming lead is very patient with me while I ask difficult questions, and the design leads are always happy to answer my questions when I come to a part I don’t understand in their plan.

            Everyone works well with each other, and while I may feel frustrated with time management and non-working solutions to programming problems, it’s an honor to be a part of the team that has been present ever since I walked into UAT. I’m not sure how accurate of an environment this is to a bigger studio, but I certainly hope that wherever I work in the future will have some splash of Team NT in its walls.