This term has been filled with ups and downs through the process of development. There have been many successful changes, implementations, new features, and new learning experiences. There also have been, however, many challenges, lots of coordination, starting over, refactoring, and discussions of new directions to take when something hasn’t gone correctly.

My project that I am working on is the A-Life Challenge project. This was to create an artificial life environment where organisms can spawn, grow, mutate, and we can study things about them. One of our biggest battles though, was time. Right off the bat, we all had very large ideas. We wanted to create a project that could become it’s own, in a sense, AI where new things could happen all on their own without any sort of direction given. We had plans to display this in an interactive sort of way where in the environment you could create organisms, add new cells, learn about the organism as you go, etc.

While we are on the way to this, we still would have a long ways to go. We have an environment where you can learn about organisms, see them change, manipulate certain parts of the environment, and get a sense of new changes that are occurring, but we have had to scale way back on what our goals were. I think that we overestimated, and by default, time wasn’t managed the best. But I think the biggest thing is that this was a learning experience for all of us in what we were doing. Creating something from the ground up was something new for a couple of us, and we just had more to do than we originally anticipated.

I think that if I were to do this again, I would want to have a clear goal and strict deadlines for when thing need to be implemented by. I think through the process we were too lenient on deadlines and this put us behind on some things. Through development, I know I personally would get caught up with something that was smaller or didn’t have that big of an impact, and this would mean I didn’t spend as much time on the next new feature or the next big item. I was stuck perfecting what was already implemented and working.

This term really showed me just how short a period of ten weeks is and how it isn’t a lot of time in the development life cycle. Some projects take years to develop with a team of more than 3 people with little to moderate experience. Overall, this has been a great learning opportunity, and a chance for me to see what I can do in the future and learn more about implementation of projects and team projects.