Zoe's Week 9 Report

what were your concrete goals for the week?

My concrete goals for the week were to work on the UI, specifically dynamic elements like health and fuel bars.

what goals were you able to accomplish?

I made significant progress toward this goal. Once the HUD image overlays were imported into the project, I worked on health and fuel bars for both the local player and teammates, teammate status symbols (green for alive, red for reviving), and teammate distance displays. I also implemented health bars on in-game entities (other players, asteroids after they're hit, the Geisel bear, etc.). Most of these changes aren't merged into main yet due to the need for multi-client testing, but they're largely ready to deploy.

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.

Multi-player testing was my main obstacle this week. It's something I can't do alone, and between the Tuesday guest lecture and a cold that kept me from even attending, I wasn't able to get into the lab with my group. Some teammates were able to test on my behalf, and I've been debugging as best I can independently until we can test together again on Thursday. I also spent time on other things that came up: adjusting asteroid spawning, reviewing PRs, and resolving merge conflicts when pulling main into the UI branch.

what are your specific goals for the next week?

My goals for next week are to get the UI branch tested, finalized, and merged into main. Beyond that, my goal is to identify where I can best contribute in this final week and help push the game to completion; the specifics will depend on where my teammates need support.

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

I learned a lot about the challenges of testing networked features in isolation. I was able to get creative with distance calculations, testing against known landmarks like Geisel and the Mothership to mock in-game updates, but testing other clients' health and fuel bars proved much harder without multiple clients running simultaneously.

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