This week’s focus was primarily on recovering from the previous week and taking some hard decisions to the Machine Learning development path. This week was the opposite of the theme propose and was not performant at all.
Exceptionally this week, the order of my personal development log comes first from the group report. So it made more sense to describe my perspective and then the evolution with the team.
Personal development: recovering
In parallel to the presentation of the module’s work, I finalised my assignment to the previous module and submitted it this week. It consumed all of my available time and disposable energy. I got so tired that I got sick and was obligated to take some days off.
The sickness gave me some time to review the presentation and what I was producing for the team. Some discomfort still unsolved since the production, I was uncomfortable with the results of my work with the Machine Learning agents. I finished finding that I would be more comfortable contributing to the game development itself and helping to build it as a small vertical slice, more polished version, than pursuing the applications of Machine Learning. Before getting this finding with the team took some time to take into account this decision.
The main benefit would be to improve my skill building a game that is much more aligned to my initial goal than the effort I was applying. A second aspect that I considered was the time that I was investing only in learning without proper production. As a result, I doubted that I would be capable use ML to improve the game design. I don’t have enough time to make more concrete demonstrations and consequently answer the reviewers’ questions raized by the reviewers. I concluded that I would not be able to do something that I enjoyed.
Group contributions: digesting the feedback and recovery week
I took some days to recover from the previous sprint, but not only me, I believe that most of the team members were exhausted by the earlier week activities. In conclusion, we skipped our first-week session and only were reunited later. I couldn’t participate in the session with Giovanni and only saw the recordings. In the next session, I presented to the team my conclusion over the feedback about ML. We agree that I would focus on the gameplay over the rest of the activities.
In this direction, I needed to review my tickets and documentation from the project, which would be my main activity for this week.
Conclusion: Health and energy management
Looking back and reviewing this week has an emotional weight over my course experience. I had to assume my incapabilities to myself and the team, recover my health and deal with all the other aspects of life.
I felt terrible to leave the ML at the side for the moment, I’ll certainly get back to this topic in the future, but I need more time to do it properly.
This week I didn’t do any research.
Lucas Souza 