Jacky's Week 9 Report

what were your concrete goals for the week?

My goals were to implement the revive system and also make asteroids explode into smaller fragments on death to pose a risk to space mining.

what goals were you able to accomplish?

I was able to implement these 2 mechanics. The reviver class (name pending) has a repair beam that uses mostly reused tractor beam code, which heals the health of other players and revives them if they are disabled. Asteroids now explode into 6 smaller fragments with high velocity.

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 mechanics I worked on took longer than expected because of a nasty bug whose cause I'm still not quite sure on. Apparently when the asteroid fragments spawn in at the site of a destroyed asteroid, it somehow collides with a test cube we placed at spawn and destroy themselves, even though they are created super far away from spawn? No idea what's happening but removing the test cube fixes the issue I guess

what are your specific goals for the next week?

I feel the most comfortable working on gameplay by far, so my goal is to finish up whatever missing or underbaked game mechanics we have, and work on balancing to make the game more fun.

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

I learned that leaving debugging backdoors for myself is always useful. For example, we didn't have a universal onDestroy method for GameObjects to attach debugging code to, so I had to do some jank typecasting to figure out why the asteroids were getting destroyed when they shouldn't be. Also using a debugger cleverly is always helpful.

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

I will be honest, I've been losing a bit of motivation throughout the later stages of the project, not strictly for this project itself but rather just less willing to put in work in general towards the end of the quarter. But I will try my best to help finish the game up for the last week. I have a feeling that we have been lacking on playtesting but I think we have enough time.