Season of KDE 2026
An amazing journey of 8 weeks full of code, new experiences, and interactions.
I had an amazing time at the Season of KDE 2026. All the guidance from my mentors, Benson Muite and Srisharan VS, really helped me work on Mankala and also helped me learn new skills.
So, lets summarize things a bit, what I was able to achieve during the span of these two months at KDE.
Complete GUI redesign
- I have made major changes in the MankalaNextGen GUI, introducing Kirigami to have different light and dark themes. Improved the design for different pages, MainMenu, Rules, About, Profile, and much more, where I worked to introduced better colors and geometry to the shapes, like buttons or display boxes.
- For the main Game interface, we made new boards and shells. I worked on integrating the logic for displaying the shells and fixing the Board based on the exact numbers shown from Mankala.
- I tried generating a board using Perlin noise, which can be later integrated into MankalaNextGen to design the boards more efficiently based on variants. Added new code to generate a calm background music and a wooden click sound to make it look more authentic.
Translations and Localization
I started learning about Lokalize, KDEβs own translation software. I had successfully made translations for Mankala Engine and MankalaNextGen in Tamil and Hindi using Lokalize.
Artworks and KDE review
- I have started working on the KDE review tasks and started with the fix to correct GitLab CI Build pipelines.
- In the last few weeks, I started learning about Krita and made cover images for the three variants Bohnenspiel, Oware, and Pallanguzhi using their cultural Mankala boards and traditional motifs.
The journey doesnβt end here. Season of KDE has been a much-needed experience to improve my commitment towards projects and open-source. I plan to work with Mankala Engine and the KDE Community much more and make many other contributions.
Thanks to my mentors, my fellow contributors, and to the entire community for helping me so far. π