Final Week Update – Season of KDE 2025
🌟 Final Week Update: Wrapping Up My SoK Journey
As the Season of KDE (SoK) 2025 comes to a close, I’m excited to share my final week update and reflect on this incredible journey of contributing to The Mankala GUI.
✅ What I’ve Accomplished
Over the past few weeks, I’ve made solid progress on the Mankala project. Here’s a breakdown of what I’ve done:
- Basic GUI Setup: I’ve successfully set up a working and interactive graphical interface for Mankala.
- Two Game Variants: Users can now play two variants — Bohnenspiel and Oware — directly from the UI.
- Board Redesign: The board has been redesigned with a clean and modern look.
Images
current state of the Board:
New redesigned board UI
🐞 Things to Fix
While the core setup is functional, there are still several things I plan to fix or improve:
- ♻️ Code Cleanup: Some parts of the code (especially the board logic) are redundant and need cleanup.
- Responsive UI: The board UI isn’t responsive on different screen sizes and needs fixing.
- Pull Instructions from Engine: The game instructions should ideally be dynamically pulled from the backend Mankala engine — this integration is pending.
🔮 Future Work
After SoK ends, here’s what I’d love to continue working on:
- Extend UI to support additional variants like Pallanghuli and Kalah.
- Enhance Board Aesthetics with better textures and polish.
- Revamp Main Menu using a clean card-based layout.
- Modularize QML Code: Organize scattered files into proper modules for maintainability.
- Add Stone Animations: Make the gameplay more interactive and lively with animations.
🙌 Wrapping It Up
This journey has been nothing short of incredible. When I started, I had no clue how to navigate or understand an existing codebase. But slowly and steadily, things started to make sense.
Here’s what I learned:
- ✨ Working with Kirigami and QML
- Integrating backend logic into a frontend application
- Understanding the Git workflow and collaboration via Merge Requests
- Team meets were fun to have ,sharing and learning about others contributions was inspiring .
Huge thanks to my mentor Benson , João , Johnny and everyone from the KDE community for the support and guidance. I’m truly grateful for this opportunity and I hope to continue making meaningful contributions to KDE.