Day 101: Today I didn’t really wanted to work. Creating content isn’t what I like the most. Once the way of doing something has been established, I don’t like to do it again. I hate repetition. But at least the game gets some changes that I can actually see and that feels like making progress.

Daily interesting stuff:

• Apparently you’re not allowed to use the red cross icon in games. I never suspected this. But I guess it makes sense.

• Lord Gaben’s AMA. I’ve never seen a post with so many replies. Gaben is so good at dodging questions. Even stuff on Half Life 3. There’s some good advice for gamedev, but it mostly steam/valve games related.

• Reddit post about flaws or qualities of game in retrospect. I can’t really describe it, but this is a nice post.

Task done:

• Fixed the problem with teleporters. Well problemS I should say… First I need to find why they were deleted when you should not. Turns out the calling order was wrong. So I change the event they listen at the start. Instead of listening for the game load, they listen to the game start. And it works. Except that when I tried it in game it there was a big block of black on the screen… It turned out to be the transition UI. But that was weird because the transition disable the UI at the end of the animation…. After a lot of searching I found out that the problem was the transition UI canvas was INSIDE the rooms. It works great in the test scene, and overall it seemed like a good idea. What I completely forgot though, is that when the player isn’t around a room, it get deactivated. That way I only have the immediate rooms active and save a lot of performance. But for the teleporters that meant that it would get deactivated mid animation. And of course, then the big black transition screen would stay on forever. So I created a global canvas specially for the transition and the teleporter use that instead.

• Implemented two bosses. I wanted to make at least all of them today. But It took way longer than I thought. Finding good patterns and make it difficult as hell without being impossible is hard. Also I had to work around a lot of problems. It was mainly due to the Life switching that enable me to modify the behavior based on the life of the bearer. But it wasn’t tested thoroughly so it has some bugs. And it’s quite sloppy too. From Monday, I can’t manage to get rid of leftovers. Each day I had some leftover from the day before… I think I’m not going to finish it all in time. But that’s ok. I originally planned to the last three days before the alpha doing marketing work. But since I decided to not actually sell my game I guess I can afford to be a bit more loose on that. Oh yeah, maybe I should’ve wrote that I’m not going to sell it before. But yeah I looked at what I would need to do both in term of marketing and legal. And I don’t have the time nor the skills. So I’m going to make it like a commercial game, but I’m only publishing it on itch.io. I still hope to find a graphical artist to work on the game though.