One thing you can guarantee when working with a team on a project is a conflict or issue arising.
One important thing is to remain cool and level headed. I am usually quiet in my team because I am an international student who is surrounded by German 7 hours a day. Therefore I cannot engage in conversation so I tune out or observe. I am quite an observant person who analysis people and behaviour. Its interesting how much you can pick up and understand even when its a language you don't understand. It's all about reading body language and tone of voice.
Nobody knows how I am feeling while working in this environment because I keep my emotions to myself. It has been difficult working in a project where you are surrounded by people talking in another language. I spend 7 hours a day here, 5 days a week. I now understand the expression " You can be complete isolated, even in a crowded room". That is me 7 hours a day, 5 days a week. My team only talk in English when we are talking about the project and even then sometimes its in German. It has been an interesting learning environment where I can only observe. Additionally it has improved my patience.
One challenge I have had with a team member is that they liked to pass their work load to me. There was a festival last week so my team was gone from Thursday to Monday. Then this teammate fell ill and was out for the entire week which created a problem with our schedule. Originally we had planned to divide the modelling and adding textures. However that did not happen and it tested my patience. I created more assets and they made a show and dance about not having time because they were sick but in reality they had a tendency to procrastinate when there was a problem. They wasted time with me talking about how long UV wrapping an object would take but when they were out sick another teammate showed me a fast way that took less than 20 seconds and that included exporting the object. The issue was adding texture then. They wanted to UV wrap and give me all the assets to add texture to, which I had never done before. So I had the challenge of learning a new software. I wanted to divide the texture workload in half but they were against it because "they did not have the time" and they also had other project work to do. For some reason they could not do both. In the end I gave up on them and took all the assets to add texture to. We have over 50 assets in total and I had about a week and a bit so learn the software and add texture to.
Once I started experimenting with Substance painter I got fast at creating textures and I had 30 textures done in a week. In conclusion when you work hard you can overcome and obstacles and challenges. I kept my emotions cool when dealing with this issue with my teammate. To be honest I doubt they even realized they were causing an issue because they were so absorbed in their own problems. Best thing to do is move forward and focus on the positivity.
