How To Make Lemonade

This week the A-Team was working on some documentation issues, both within the game for the user and on the activity's wiki.  For the most part this was a good first step: simple, but rewarding.

We divided up the tasks between the team pretty well, and having our code up on subversion is so helpful!  One of the first steps was done by Carlynn Carter, who created a new welcome screen for us that included the name of the activity and it looks great!  I know she had some frustrations in that project, but you can read her blog to find out more about it. 

As we worked we found that a solution to one of our problems was mysteriously implemented.  Previously, there were no instructions about how to play the game, what keys to press, or what things to watch out for - things you would normally find in a 'help' section.  Since we had struggled with this we decided it was important to add.  As we were familiarizing ourselves with the code and updating from svn we saw that all of a sudden help messages appeared on every screen in the game!  We initially thought that an absent team member had made giant leaps of success, but he denies any knowledge of it!  Where this change came from is still under investigation.  While this did give us a huge step forward, it was still not implemented in the best way, in our opinion, so we continued studying the source code and Francis Ani created a way to make these messages appear or disappear by pressing the 'h' key.  Success again!

I took responsibility for updating the activity's wiki page.  This may seem very simple, but since I am not overly familiar with formatting within a wiki, it was a bit challenging.  There are still some other improvements I would like to make to the wiki, but as my week begins to overwhelm me and it is only Monday, I'm choosing to prioritize my work. 

I am still very pleased with our progress this week and feel that I have a better understanding of the time commitment that needs to be made each week to keep up with our schedule.  It will definitely be challenging, but I still believe we can do it, especially if our team communication continues as well as it has so far!