Day 106: Today I have a mild back pain. It might be related to me almost never going outside and spending most of my time badly seated in front of a computer. Or maybe it’s aliens. Anyway, I got stuff done today, I even had the luxury to take a small nap (because I’m a lazy bastard).

Daily interesting stuff:

• Reddit post, the video game attorney posting a list of basic legal stuff. There’s also their approximate price and what he himself charge.

• Reddit post, how to judge the quality of your game. This is an interesting question. It’s a shame that there’s not more replies. Maybe no one has a clue on how to do it.

• Article on how to sell an indie game. I don’t really know why I read that but at least it’s well written. Give it a go.

Tasks done:

• Fixed a bug in the “loot chest” achievement. I just forgot to remove the listener when the object is destroyed. So the ref would prevent the garbage collector to do it’s job and next thing you know, you have 10 times the achievement unlock popping with an unrelated ship.

• Finished the alpha trailer. Yup that’s all that I’ve done today. And I’m still happy about it. The trailer itself is definitely better than the pre-alpha. It’s more dynamic and more coherent. But I’m still not completely satisfied with it. But I’m afraid that’s the best I can do with my current skills. Since I have a lot of space left today, I’m going to go into some details. Capturing the video shots was really long. It was hard to find good pieces. Last time, I just captured a bunch of stuff while playing an hoped to find good parts in it. This time I had a clear goal for each capture. I knew which ship I wanted, with which weapon and in which zone. I also made a bunch of features to help the capture. First I activated the cheat feature. It enables me to deactivate the ship collider, so I can go through anything (walls, enemies, bullets). I can activate it with a simple button push (B). Then I modified the pause system so that it just paused the game and didn’t show the menu. Finally I implemented a feature that enables me to restart the main game. I just press a button (the same as the bomb) and it sends me back to the start. Add that the fact that I can modify the save like I want in Unity, and changing ship and weapons is super easy (also glad to have a dual screen). But even with all these features, it was still hard to capture cool moments. Mainly because of the constraint I had. I wanted each capture to start with a hit, end with one, and take around 3 seconds. Another thing that was really bothersome was to fight with the video editing software. I used the free version of VSDC video editor. It’s simple and has enough features. But seriously the UI is fucked up. Some things don’t make any sense! But I work through it, and finished this damn trailer. I might skip the beta trailer… Anyway, I’ll post the alpha publicly tomorrow! just in time for my birthday.