Day 102: Today I finished early and did some grocery shopping. It was time to it, we were running on scrapes for four days… Oh and I decided to end the sprint today. Because I finished the content. And since I’m one day late on planning, I don’t have time to do all the polish before the end of the sprint. So I’m ending it now, and I’ll work on a micro polish sprint friday and Monday.

Daily interesting stuff:

• Union for gamedevs. I’m not so much in for unions in general. But this article seemed interesting.

• Reddit post, why are retro 3d considered bad. Because “retro 3d” is the beginning of 3d and is downright ugly. Meanwhile retro 2d was a pretty advanced state of 2d.

• Youtube video of errors indie make while contacting press. What bother me with this type of things is that there don’t seem to be applicable things. In communication advices it’s always like “hey try to talk this really general way but not exactly that actually”. This time it’s ‘write using stories, but except I don’t care about most of it so good luck finding some stuff that’s ok”.

• Gamasutra article from William Pugh (Stanley parable). This guy is completely nuts. I love it. It’s a really funny and informative article, you should read it.

Tasks done:

• Made the last two bosses. I actually took the first boss and said it would be the third. Then I made an easier first boss. Doing the last boss proved to be more challenging. It’s hard to find good patterns and not doing the same thing over and over. I played Don Don Pachi to get in the SHMUP feel. But all that did was make me realise I really don’t have any particular talent for this kind of stuff. But I still managed to get something decent that should give players a lot of pain (mouahahahaha)

• Implemented the bosses in the main scene. That required a lot of things. First I had to put the bosses’ rooms in the scene and far from the dungeon. That was easy. Then I had to create dungeon rooms that would hold teleporters to the bosses. That was long. Then I had to fix a bug where when you beat a boss it would save it like a hundred time (int added to list). That was relatively quick. Then I had to fix a bug where the bosses wouldn’t shoot any bullets. It was like they were on strike! They were moving but no shooting at all. That’s kinda disappointing isn’t it? So I adjusted my debug hat (which I already put on for the save bug) and jumped onto the code. After a few troubleshooting, I found out that it was caused by a simple assumption made in the enemies codes. There it required that the enemies are created after the player. And that’s the case for all the enemies. Except the bosses since I “hacked” and put them in the scene directly. So I modified the code to take that into account. Now if the enemy is created before the player, it falls back to another solution.

• Implemented some treasure rooms. I just took the rooms where I already put a lot of coins, added a chest, and marked it as a treasure room. It was still a lot of grunt and boring work, but I did it fast.

• Put some destrucable barrels in rooms. I had like 10 minutes left before the hour I wanted to stop working. So I did this task really fast. I took random rooms and put barrels at random positions. I have no idea of the consequences of this. But since none of the gameplay is tuned, it shouldn’t be that important.

Sprint end: This concludes the content sprint. It really made the game alive. Now there’s stuff everywhere. It’s not just all running in my head anymore! I hope that it’s enough to portray the game efficiently.

What went wrong:

• I’m a day late. I was late during all the sprint, and I never managed to catch on.

• I have a TON of stuff left, and I’m not sure the next sprint is going to be long enough to cover it.

What went right:

• Not much motivation problems this time. Everyday was productive even if it wasn’t really intentional.

• I think I have a lot of content. If I manage to polish that to a decent level, I’ll have a good alpha. Maybe event closer to the beta than I thought.