What shipping Baoli taught me about being a generalist

Baoli was the first project where my work regularly crossed disciplines. One day it was a rig, the next it was a gameplay bug, then an animation pass. On a small team the job is rarely just your part. It is finding the next unblocked thing and learning just enough to do it properly.

Context switching is a skill

Moving between a rig, a blueprint and an animation polish pass in the same day is exhausting at first. What made it manageable was writing down where I stopped, so the next context started with a clear next step instead of ten minutes of re-reading my own graph.

Ask for the constraint, not the answer

Early on I asked people how to do things. What helped more was asking what the thing had to do, and what it must not break. That gave me room to find an approach that fit the project instead of copying one that fit a tutorial.

What I would do differently

• Prototype the ugly version sooner and get feedback before polishing.
• Keep a running notes file of every tool quirk I hit.
• Ask for a code review even when the feature already works.

Being a generalist is not knowing everything. It is being comfortable being new at something for a day, and still shipping it.