Apprentice seeking Master - A personal ad... sorta

I am Daedalus. I'm new to the Unity forums. For as long as I can remember, I've wanted to get into game development. However, I always learned by starting my own projects, which usually involve getting a small team together (I'm no artist, nor master programmer, though I do dabble in both). It hasn't really taken me where I'd like to be, so I think the solution is shake things up. Follow, instead of lead, at least for a while.

Here's what I'm looking for:

Someone who is highly talented, works on their own projects. Someone looking for a partner, someone to bounce ideas off of, delegate work, share methods and routines.

What you get:
A severely hard-working and dedicated associate. Familiarity with Unity, Javascript, and C#, through study of computer science in college, and the refresher I've been giving myself by using Unity.

I know what some responses would be, it's a wide community, gather knowledge from the group as I go on my own path. And I will do that, oh yes, but I'm calling out for something a little more direct and involved. I want to help someone on their project, and learn as much as I can on the way.

 

dude,best way to learn is to make you own game
start with a small project that can be finished within 2-3months.

 

Everybody learns differently. I'm working my own projects, but that's not what this is about.

 

Probably would get more attention in the collaboration forums. Anyway you should post some screens of past works maybe, and maybe your location generally... Hope you find sometime to help ya out! If not help improve my open source pixel destruction project haha

http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/destructible-pixel-terrain-open-source.198919/

 

I thought about posting to collab, but this is more personal based than project. Oh, and I am American.

 

Actually, I think this is a great idea. A lot of self taught people miss things that cost them dearly in the long run, because "you don't know what you don't know" (unconscious incompetence). Working with someone who is aware of what you don't know could potentially be a huge boon in directing you to learn about it. Explorative learning is great, but guided learning is better if it's available and relevant, and I don't see why it wouldn't be relevant here.

Having said that, is it available? Personally, I'd have found the offer super tempting not too long ago. With my current project I'd be reluctant to bring anyone on board, though. And plenty of people would be reluctant in any case, as having a learner on board necessarily means a drop in quality for some areas. So it's only an overall benefit if the extra quantity of work overcomes the reduced quality.

Finding someone local would also be a huge help here. As great as working online can be there's some parts of in-person collaboration that it can't replace. When I'm working with people I try to get in the same room with them at least once per week to share work and updates and such. If someone's going to be guiding you... well, there's a lot to software design and implementation that's better done away from a computer screen, but if you stick online you'll be limiting yourself to the screen.

Anyway, good luck finding someone to work with! If you can't manage that, I do suggest finding a team to get involved with. Even if they're not the "master" to your "apprentice" you'll still learn more, especially if you put some effort into learning and sharing knowledge as a team. At the very least you'll eat away at your areas of unconscious incompetence because being aware of what others on your team are learning will increase the areas you're exposed to even if you're not learning them directly yourself.

 

Looking for a mentor? Brilliant idea, and yet finding one on the web is tricky. When I mentor, I avoid losing them in the technical details - Google covers details just fine. Instead, I guide my aspiring stars toward a higher level of thinking, toward excellence. So, though I can't take on another mentoree at this time, I can offer the advice that's proven most valuable.

- Adopt a Growth Mindset (Wikipedia Basics or the book)
- Grok Deliberate Practice (Try things ALMOST beyond your ability)
- Fail, Improve, Repeat
- Read this thread
- Study Flow (here, and here, and here)
- Juice It Or Lose It

Now go start your 10,000 hours of deliberate practice.
Gigi

 

+1 for seeking a mentor. Unfortunately it'll definitely be hard to find one online.

In theory, the easiest way to learn would be to jump in on somebody else's project and help out - but in reality, this is actually a drain on the project owner's time and resources because you're not yet autonomous; you'll make mistakes that need to be fixed later, you'll get stuck on simple things, and generally every time your mentor shows you something, they'll be thinking "this would go quicker if I just did it myself".

This isn't a flaw on your part or anything you can change - but you should definitely understand the situation. You might have to offer something besides your eventual competence to sweeten the deal. Maybe you have another skill (like art, business, marketing, music, etc) that you can add to the team while you learn development?

 

If you want to learn, its better to join a project than working alone, you will see different method to write code, compare with your and it will make your code more structured because you need to write in in an understandable way for other devs