Alex's Week 6 Report

what were your concrete goals for the week?

I wanted to get a better idea of the artistic vision for the game, as well as looking into lighting, reflection, and materials.

what goals were you able to accomplish?

I talked with Sofia and she decided to move towards lower-poly textures than what we had in the moodboard, especially since we brainstormed a ton of different gameplay features we wanted that would each require a lot more modeling work. I implemented lighting and different materials in a toy project, though am not quite sure what to do about it with the game yet, since I haven't seen the resulting models. I also figured out how to get the project built on windows, so I can develop on my home computer. (WSL doesn't seem to handle mouse input well, native linux framerate is really low for some reason, and framerate being below tick rate messes things up right now).

if the week went differently than you had planned, what were the reasons? note that this happens regularly...I would prefer you to be aggressive in what you want to try accomplish rather than limit yourself to goals you know you'll easily achieve. so answering this question is more of a reflection on the development process and the surprises you encounter, it's not at all an evaluation.

I've been working more on game design and implementing non-graphics features, which I think is fine for now until more models and assets come out, and I have a better vision of what the game will be like. I'm happy with what we did on Tuesday - we brainstormed a lot of game features as a group that I am excited to see be put in place.

what are your specific goals for the next week?

I want to get started on using Imgui to implement some UI stuff like debugging menus (I was inspired by group 2 but also there is a PR that introduces the FreeType library, so I'll probably end up using that). I also want to make the game low-FPS friendly, which will involve implementing some extra server-side logic to handle dropped client inputs.

what did you learn this week, if anything (and did you expect to learn it)?

I wrote some of my own shaders for the first time and am pretty confident I can now get whatever is in my mind to the screen (though this might be dunning kreuger effect).

what is your individual morale (which might be different from the overall group morale)?

Good