Raptor Racers: Week 5

Progress on the game has slowed somewhat, there are random fluctuations in progress each week. Some weeks we get together, figure out what needs to be done and actually program something that sort of works. Other weeks, like this week, the whole group mainly just focuses on assignments and generally does not touch the game code or discuss much about the game.

Although comparatively, last semester the real heavy lifting started right around after midterms. The moment we were done, we went into a sort of panic, and our group meetings increased twofold, and productivity went up substantially. I have a feeling that this will happen again, as we only have pretty much 1 month and a bit to complete the requirements for our game. We only have 3 midterms to study for though, and that will put a substantially lower amount of stress on the whole group as a whole.

A new group member has also joined us a while back. This is a new unexpected twist that we will have to work around. It is quite difficult to assign tasks to this group member because a lot of context needs to be provided to him in order for him to be an effective group member. All of our group members already have specific roles that they fulfill, and adding one more group member in is giving us a more difficult time than it should.

Another thing that is giving me issues is that we definitely need to start learning how shaders work. At this point in time we have no idea how difficult they are going to be to implement. From what I hear and have researched, it could be as easy as telling OpenGL to run a separate piece of code during it's rendering stage, or as difficult as writing your own shader code that effectively simulates real world materials. It's great that various teachers are telling us to prototype and plan out before setting out to program and create art for the game. I agree, and this works well with people who already know at least some of what they are doing. Unfortunately for students, this is not the case. We are learning as we go, and we have no idea how long some aspects will take to implement, or how difficult it will be to even implement simple game mechanics (like jumping for our Raptors). This makes planning, brainstorming and idea generation in general incredibly difficult.