Starting a project from scratch is kind of terrifying.
Between You, Me, & the Trees was the first project I worked on as a project leader, so I got to see the whole thing happen from basically nothing. I learned a lot from leading the team, but honestly, I learned just as much from my teammates and from all the weird little problems we had to solve together.
A lot of my time was spent trying to balance two things at once: doing my own development work and making sure everyone else had what they needed to keep going. Sometimes that meant planning, sometimes it meant troubleshooting, and sometimes it meant staring at code and wondering why something that worked yesterday had suddenly decided not to work today.
One of the things I’m most proud of is the inventory system.
Originally, we thought we would just buy or import an existing one. Easy, right? Except the options we found were either too expensive or way more annoying to integrate than expected. So eventually it became: okay, I guess we’re building an inventory system now.
And we did.
There was definitely a learning curve. I had to figure out the toggle functionality, test it with different trinkets, break it, fix it, test it again, and then realize there were three more situations I had not thought about yet. It taught me a lot about building systems that can actually grow with the game instead of only working for the exact thing you need in that moment.
I also became extremely familiar with Git merge conflicts.
Like. Extremely familiar.
When multiple people are working on different parts of the same game, eventually Git decides it is time for everyone to suffer a little. I spent a lot of time merging branches, resolving conflicts, and trying to understand how different pieces of the project connected to each other.
Sometimes things got lost. Sometimes someone had to redo work. Sometimes that someone was me. Sorry again to everyone who had to deal with that 🫶
But weirdly, dealing with all of those conflicts helped me understand the project better. Every time something broke, I had to trace where it came from, who was working on what, and how all the systems fit together. It forced me to stop thinking only about my own code and start seeing the game as one big connected thing.
And I think that was probably one of the biggest lessons for me.
Looking back, Between You, Me, & the Trees was not really one giant breakthrough moment. It was a lot of tiny ones. Fixing something that had been broken for hours. Watching a feature finally work. Seeing someone add a piece of art or writing and suddenly the game felt a little more real. Celebrating small wins with the team and slowly realizing that all these separate pieces were becoming an actual game.
Being a team leader taught me that leadership is not really about standing above the project and telling everyone what to do.
Sometimes it is just being in the mess with everyone else.
Writing code. Fixing problems. Breaking things. Fixing them again. And somehow keeping the team moving toward something you are all excited to make.