A Novice Beginning

Today, I would like to share a little bit about how Team Autonomous was formed and how we got to where we are now. I should let you in on a little secret first though. We haven’t always been called Team Autonomous. Initially, we just called ourselves the Novice Game Dev Team. Yes, I know that is a pretty lame name, but it really conveyed who we were and what we were about.

Three months ago, we started out as a team of novices who just wanted to develop a video game with Unity 3D. There was Jay (the team leader and programmer), Daniel (Game Designer), Ben (lead modeler), and Bucco (modeler). Progress was very slow at first due to people’s schedules, but things started to move forward faster after a month or so. Then at the end of June, things went from great to bad. Jay told us that he was going to have to pass off the lead to myself, Daniel, and quit the team, due to him starting college soon. Luckily, Jay wasn’t a douche and didn’t just leave without helping the team transition to a new leader and find his replacements. Within a few days of finding out Jay was leaving, Jay had found a replacement programmer, Andre, and composer, Brandon, for the team. We also needed a replacement Concept Artist, but those seem to be hard to come by. At first, both of these replacements looked like they were going to work out, but after a few weeks, they both just disappeared and all attempts to communicate with them were futile.

After realizing our new programmer and composer were gone, I started looking for replacements for the replacements, on the Unity forums. Within a week, I was able to find our current programmer, James, and composer, Trevor. So far, both of these guys have been great and we have made a tremendous amount of progress on Project NUTS, our current game that we are developing. Because Novice Game Dev Team was a lame name and we were in a sense a new team, I decided to change our name from that to Team Autonomous. Also, the name didn’t seem to fit the team too well since some of our members were not novices. So there you have it, a brief history of Team Autonomous. In the next blog post, I will go over the history of Project NUTS.

Have any questions, comments, or would like to share an experience you have had while working on a team? Please leave a comment below.

Take it easy,

Daniel