Fun fun. I’ve been working on some more design-oriented stuff for work. Tomorrow’s sort of the first “test” of it all – literally, as I’ve got a tester at my disposal to hammer on the prototypes I’ve made. It’s a bit daunting, actually – tomorrow I get my first independant feedback, I actually “manage” a person for a day, and now, it’s not just my time I’m wasting if I screw up.

So, it’s sort of strange – I was asking for some design-related responsibility, and I’ve got it – which is *awesome*. It’s also pretty intimidating, as the feature I’m responsible for appears to have become one of the relatively major selling points of the game, at least internally. It’s really one of those situations where if I kick ass, I think it’s a real opportunity to get more responsibility, at the same time, the converse is true, where if I really screw this up, it is almost entirely all on my head.

The strange thing, of course, is that I have almost no real “experience” in this regard. Sure, Aura was a great project in the sense that we all gave design related input, and getting sort of “nuts & bolts” experience on something *else* was really helpful. And last year’s game was a real learning experience, as my position really required understanding almost every aspect of its production. But, fundamentally, we’re dealing with a pretty huge project- even bigger than the quarter million dollar reactor I made at my last job pretty much by my lonesome. With this, at this point, I’m still just wasting just my time if I screw up (and one more person, potentially, tomorrow). But once we get into production, there’s gonna be a pretty large number of people that this design impacts, and any mistakes that get missed now increased tenfold to fix at every step.

whoo.

So, yeah – no progress without risk, I suppose. But what’s the alternative? The status quo? No thanks. I think, so far, that things have turned out pretty well. Tomorrow, I’ll get feedback, and for good or ill, the result will be progress.