Bernico's Week 7 Report

what were your concrete goals for the week?

My goals were to do Objects with health subclass, shooting asteroids, getting the mothership's fire emergency task mechanic that reduces timer started, and helping my teammates with the UI and win conditions (i.e. item checklists for things collected in the mothership).

what goals were you able to accomplish?

I was able to finish creating a LivingObject subclass of GameObject that would store health and take damage, and from it, I was also able to quickly finish the mechanic of shooting down asteroids with the player's laser. I was also able to finish revamping the mothership object so now it reacts to asteroids around it (detecting and getting “damaged” from it in the form of a reduced timer), and also occasionally spawns random emergencies. The emergencies are: fire that makes the timer goes down faster and the player needs to get to the mothership and fix it, a thief that comes to the ship and steal fuels from the mothership (and tries to escapes back to its spawn point once its inventory is full or got spotted), and a space virus that damages the mothership (again reducing time) and teleporting around when hit.

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.

The week was very busy for me, most notably because I was not able to attend the group meeting on Tuesday because of a personal task I had to deal with, and as such, I couldn't finish all of the goals I set for myself, although I made up for it by focusing more on one of the aspects of my goal either. Notably, at the start of the week my goal was just to do one emergency (fire), but I ended up working on all of the planned emergencies of the game, which I'm really proud of. Still, for the UI and win conditions goal, I ended up not doing them because of both time, and the fact that I never really touched them in the project before and thus why I couldn't get it started quickly either. Again, given the time constraints, looking back, I am really proud of what I was able to accomplish this week.

what are your specific goals for the next week?

Just like my team suggested, I think next week's goal for our team would be mostly polishing with what we already implemented. Personally, I plan to assist my team with the UI, especially with displaying the warnings for the emergencies I made this week, along with displaying items to be collected for the win condition. If this is done, I would also like to work more on balance and level design since I feel like we need to make sure everything we've been working on is organized and mixed well such that the game ends up being fun.

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

I learned more about how NPC behaviors work in game development. For example, how the thief should get stunned for 1 second when it's spotted before trying to run away, and thinking about how it can escape from the player (for now they reach their spawn point and then teleporting away), are all just if cases and conditions checking. I did expect to learn more about this when I set out to do the emergencies, since I know I will be working with NPC entities.

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