Jacky's Week 6 Report

what were your concrete goals for the week?

My goals this week were to start designing the next features of the game to add, flesh out the ship controls to make it more user friendly, and work on some other gameplay systems.

what goals were you able to accomplish?

We had a group meeting on Tuesday where we figured out what we wanted to do for the game, so there are now very clearly laid out tasks. I first worked on reworking the steering controls of the player ship, and adding some extra features such as braking and boosting. I also added an asteroid type that explodes into fuel pickups when destroyed.

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.

Had some jank related to the inputs from the client side getting dropped due to FPS mismatch, which I'm still looking into. Otherwise my tasks are going as planned.

what are your specific goals for the next week?

My goal is to implement the "tractor beam" mechanic, which will essentially work like a gravity gun to give the player a fun way to manipulate objects around them. If there's more time I might help with the damage and revive mechanics, or start work on the NPC ships you have to chase down.

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

I learned that forcing client FPS to match server ticks has its downsides when client is unable to keep up, and I'm looking into solutions to make the server assume certain player inputs if it hasn't received anything.

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

My morale is really good since we're getting into implementing the meat of the gameplay with still roughly half of our time remaining. I'm pretty confident that even if we can't fully finish our idea, we'll get a very good amount of it implemented.