Day 104: Today, I’m writing this from my laptop. Thankfully, it’s not because I left home, it’s because I actually finished the sprint. And thus I have a release candidate for the alpha milestone ! So naturally I asked my roommate to test it. And he’s still playing it. Now you know the amazing story behind me having to write today’s log on my laptop.

Daily interesting stuff:

• Reddit post, person asking advice regarding teammate that stole jam project. It was really sad to see that his teammate turned out to be such an ass… And there’s not much that can be done either.

• Reddit post, asking how to save the data of a persistent open world. Responses are really interesting.

• Reddit post, question about where to find funding for a one man team. Most answers were kickstarter or early access. But one person mentioned a « grant » from kongregate. It seems cool

• GDC vault video about portfolio. I haven’t watched it yet, but it seems awesome.

Tasks done:

• Added sounds to the lasers. It was much needed. The lasers are now so much cooler ! Making the sound effect was harder than expected. Like for all the other sounds, I used bfxr. Which is a super cool online chiptune sound maker. But I couldn’t make what I wanted. So I got the closest that I could, and then edited it with audacity. I made it in mirror so that it loops nicely. I had to try 4 – 5 different sounds before finding something that I liked enough. The code in itself is simplistic, I added the sound as a component to the laser check the box to say it’s looping. And then when you fire I play the stop. And when you stop I stop the sound.

• Added sounds to the UI. Before, the menus were really empty. Now it’ much better. Even if I’m not satisfied with the error and validate sounds… The sounds that plays when a panel pops down was also a bit harder to make. Finding the right « swwooosh » noise was complicated. The implementation was also easy, but a bit more complicated. I had to play sounds in a variety of different ways. Some are from the UI, some are from parts of the codebase, some are from other parts of the code base. So to keep it as clean as possible, the UI code uses a direct ref to the soundPlayer and the code base call uses the event system.

• Fixed various things about the keyboard inputs. It was mostly about rebind things and adding some where I forgot and only had the gamepad inputs. Before you couldn’t switch weapon and the bomb input opened the pause menu… So I fixed all that. I also did an overall of the input screen for the keyboard. It’s a simple UI that shows the main inputs at the start of the game. The gamepad one was cool and used some decent assets. The keyboard one was still the old version : a static image with a weird red font and some ugly key images.

• Disabled the mouse in the menus. I finally found a solution for that. I tried many things but I always got this freaking automatic behaviour where if you clicked anywhere on screen it deselect the selected UI. It was a blocking bug. But someone on the net posted a dirty solution that works like a charm. The idea is to take the Input module code which happen to be a small part of Unity that is actually open sourced. And then copy paste that and modify some parts to make your custom input module. It’s dead simple and it works well. But to copy a whole class of the engine from an online repo, well that’s not really clean…

• Fixed the sorting layer of the tutorial text. It was supposed to be on the floor, but the ships were below it. That was weird, so I fixed it

• Fixed the ship details pane initial position. Because in 1440p it would be visible even when closed. I just had to put further right.

• Made that the combo reset completely when you take a hit. I thought that just a -1 malus was to easy. So now it resets all the way down to x1.

• Fixed a bug in the achievement UI. It was a null reference problem.

• Fixed some bugs with the hitbox. First, the stealth ship had a much smaller hitbox than I wanted. Then I realized the hitbox upgrade would raise your life and the life raised your hitbox… Stupid mistakes, thankfully they’re easy to correct.

• Rounded the score UI. Just like the main score UI it would show floats. That would be weird to have 50023.455$.

Sprint end: This concludes the polish sprint. Where I didn’t learn how to speak polish, but I still have a cooler game. I have a good candidate for the alpha. And I’m happy with the state of the game. However my roommate tested it and now I have post-its full of bugs and stuff to check.

What went wrong:

• not much this time ! Maybe I could have less bugs.

What went right:

• I did all that I wanted. And in time !

• Game looks cool.