Hello everyone,

I'm currently enrolled at school in which part of the curriculum is to be in a year long game project with other individuals within the same game class. Over the course of this summer, I developed a framework which I presented to them for us to use. It's not extremely amazing, but I do feel like it is a nice piece I have created that is both robust and flexible for additions and creating game content. Regarding the situations that I'm about to express, my background consists of coding for over 10 years through BASIC, Java, C# and C++ through academic and mainly personal project purposes.

The project with the group has been going on now for 5 weeks, started early September when I presented the documentation and framework to them, which this last week was our engine proof milestone; the presentation went well. (This is the documentation I presented to them: http://chazix-scripts.com/Documentation/ParadoxEngine/ParadoxEngineRev90414.pdf) However, throughout the events that lead up to this situation I was encountering situations that grew increasingly frustrating. Particularly between myself and one other individual, however beyond just the one individual I was beginning to feel increasingly disregarded, in terms of opinion and respect on particular systems for integrating into the framework. It was strange, they wouldn't come to the individual who created the framework, to ask how to integrate a particular something into the engine, it almost seemed as if I began to not exist to them. I was however the outsider to this group, they have been grouped together for a year prior to this semester beginning.

The situation that sparked my firing from the group revolves around this individual trying to implement an Introspection and Reflection system for serialization of our particular GameObjects and Components. There consisted of a wide range of templated functions for identifying the types and variables that were associated with a particular class / structure, and then outputting the serialized data to a file.

The main problem that sparked myself expressing verbal frustration with the group took place when this individual convinced everyone else in the group that, "We can't use constructors at all" as a conclusion to his problem when the problem stemmed from them just not being implemented in the first place, causing the linker errors. This frustration also heavily stemming from that particular individual convincing everyone else that they are right when the solution was right there in front of them. Which from my perspective translated to them not caring, looking for the easiest path and not respecting my opinion and thoughts on the situations. Before this, the same individual convinced everyone that we can't use private and protected data, where I disagreed. Upon being able to look at the problem the solution was to just create a member function to be called on engine initialization to bind that particular data type and it's members to the introspection and reflection system. Which, that verbal frustration I exerted lead the producer talking to various other instructors followed by the producer firing me.

I came to you all to hopefully help reflect on this situation. I am new to working amongst peers, at least only have been for a year or so in this sort of academical group environment. Can you help me point out maybe something that I did wrong, or maybe it's for the best. How can I be a better group member and leader when being the individual distributing the heart of the engine amongst future groups to come. I am now considered an independent I suppose and have to go find a new group, either make my own or join a studio group that is ran by an instructor. My professional and career goals are to work in the industry amongst other peers, I want to learn from this situation. The main problem now that I have to sort out is will they be able to keep this framework that I spent my summer and these past five weeks working on? (About 4k lines of code) I'll need to talk to the instructors and ask about the policy.

Thank you for any advice you can give me.

They were aware that I was working on the framework for usage over the summer for this years project. We are required to create our own work from the ground up with minimal middle ware. Rendering APIs, SDL and GUI APIs are okay, but everything else needs to be done by us. Physics, math libraries, message passing, etc. It was mutually decided that we would be working from my work. Especially because I had work to show instead of them having nothing and us starting from the ground up.

The main problem that sparked myself expressing verbal frustration with the group took place when this individual convinced everyone else in the group that, "We can't use constructors at all" as a conclusion to his problem when the problem stemmed from them just not being implemented in the first place, causing the linker errors. This frustration also heavily stemming from that particular individual convincing everyone else that they are right when the solution was right there in front of them.

How exactly did you express it?

Put differently, were you finding problems or were you finding solutions?

Wording and presentation are very important.

If you regularly present flaws in negative terms the fallout is frequently as you described. Imagine: "This is wrong and that is wrong and this other thing is wrong. Wrong. Wrong! WRONG!" Very quickly others will stop listening to the doomsayers. Those who are frequently negative will be pushed to the side, ignored, and eventually removed. You won't stay with any group for long with that action, even if you are correct that the solution is flawed.

If you present them in more positive terms or neutral speculative terms others are more willing to accept the change. imagine: "I can see that your idea solves a lot of the problems, but I'm still concerned about the constructors getting called correctly. What would happen if we tried this approach instead?" It is much harder to dismiss the positively worded alternatives.

Even with a positive attitude you need to be careful, once the group comes to a consensus to choose a particular solution you need to contribute fully to the decision, even if you didn't agree with it. I cannot begin to count the number of times in my career I have had to implement solutions that I felt were not ideal or were incomplete. In those cases, if the solution failed I don't want them to come back and say it failed because I wasn't committed to the decided course. Once the decision is made to follow a course, you don't spend the rest of the trip harping on the fact that it wasn't the course you wanted, you follow the decision and see what you can learn from it, good and ill.

Reading your post, many of the things you are asking come with a negative tone. In one part you are seeking to assign blame. In others you are asking if your negativity is justified. You state it is their fault they fired you. You claim they stopped listening to you. They treated you like an outsider. You say you felt it was "them not caring". They needed to change. The implied message is that they are completely wrong-headed and you are completely correct, your position unassailable. The negativity might come from you being frustrated when you wrote your post, or it might be systemic in the way you communicate.

I've known many programmers who, because their training taught them to think in negative terms about what could go wrong and program defensively, began to communicate in negative terms and behave defensively. You might want to get some outside verification to see if you regularly come across as negative or if you regularly come across as positive. You might also want to enlist future team members to serve as an external comparison to ensure you seem to others like you are contributing, and to compare it against what you seem to yourself you are presenting. Others may interpret your actions very differently from your own self assessment.

The main problem now that I have to sort out is will they be able to keep this framework that I spent my summer and these past five weeks working on? (About 4k lines of code) I'll need to talk to the instructors and ask about the policy.

Probably. You make it sound like a regular job. That's the kind of thing with an employment contract that says they own what you create. If not, it sounds like a school project, and most schools have policies that you accept implicitly that the school retains the rights to use your work.

Even so, you're talking about 4000 lines of code. Many people write that much on a good weekend for their personal projects. Many people put out that much in a professional environment every week, if not more, when they are on green field projects. (Usually much less when doing maintenance, but that's a different scenario.)

Chances are very good that they own the rights to it. Even if somehow they don't have a claim to it, what are you going to do? Demand that they not use it? That's a great way to burn bridges and make enemies. I recommend against it, especially for something of so little value.