(Long Overdue) Google Summer of Code Wrap-Up

Since Google Code-In 2016, I’ve been a frequent contributor to Terasology, an open-source voxel based game (a bit like Minecraft) developed by the MovingBlocks organization. Sometime this February, the org admin asked me if I would like to be a mentor for Google Summer of Code, an online program where undergraduate students work on a project over several months under the guidance of mentors.

For the past 4 months, I have been mentoring Arpan Banerjee, a student at IIT Bombay (do check out his blog here). He had come up with a proposal to implement an Anatomy-based health system for players and non-player characters, and to extend a pre-existing (but not functional) and partially implement a proposal to use genetics for natural variation that I had written during GCI. For a complete list of deliverables, check out his wrap-up post here.

What’s next? Well over the next few months we plan to come up with a plan to completely resolve the natural variation proposal (to implement genetics for farming, etc.), and to extend the Anatomy system so that anatomy parts and their attributes can affect a player’s dynamic stats (for example, strong legs imply more speed; broken legs, not so much).

This summer (well monsoon for me) has been an amazing experience for me. It was my first time being a mentor, and I have realized that it is just as hectic as being a mentee. Props to Arpan for being such an awesome mentee (still feels weird to call him my student, considering he’s 3 years older than me), to XTariq for being a great co-mentor, and to Cervator for inviting me to the program.

It was a pleasure working with the MovingBlocks community, and I look forward to many more such experiences.