Day 112: Today, I really didn’t want to write the log. Maybe it’s because it’s friday, and I can’t wait to do other things. But you know force of habit. And I really want to say that I wrote what I’ve done EVERYDAY for all the project. It sounds much better than “everyday, except one time but it was friday”. I hope you appreciate the efforts I do for you, unexisting reader.

Daily interesting stuff:

• Is there an exodus from indie to AAA. Article premises: “lot of people went indie, didn’t make money, went back to AAA”. Still good to read.

• Can you use itch.io to fund your game? Answers most likely not.

• Is it weird being more picky now that I now gamedev? It certainly change your perception of the medium. As for myself, I can’t immerse in games like I used to or like I still do with books. There’s always tiny details that break the flows. Details I wouldn’t noticed before. Stuff like bugs, missions problems, unclearness, etc.

Tasks done:

• Read a bunch of articles. Yes I do this everyday, but I’m trying to make some volume, to hide the fact that I didn’t do much. Learning new stuff is always helpful. A friend of mine started doing a “newsletter” in the facebook group of my school. It’s a curated gamedev related article list. It’s great, I saw things that I didn’t notice before. My reddit post from yesterday was even there!

• Opened up my reddit post one last time. In final, I got 52 upvotes. I think that’s the most I ever had my whole life. That’s cool. I finally raised my reddit karma, it was stucked to 3 for years (yes I’m a lurker). For those who didn’t read yesterday’s log, the question of the post was “What considered to be a “finished” game”. I read all the comments. I tried to come up with more objective levels of completion for game:

  • 1: The game exists. It’s when you have the core gameplay up and a running. At least the dev can play it and it doesn’t crashes all the time.

  • 2: The game is published. It’s when a player can go from the main menu to the end game/game over, without crash and without needing external help (like the devs explaining everything orally).

  • 3: The game is accomplished. It’s when the goals you set are achievement. It’s when your game reflects the vision you wanted of it. I used the term accomplished to imply the notion that it comes from within, the devs also feel accomplished.

  • 4: The game is complete. It’s when adding/modifying the game would be unnecessary/unwanted.

• Migrated the project to Unity 5.5. I thought it would be a pain to do. But it was actually very straightforward. Unlike from the time I moved from a preview version, there were no errors or broke things. It still took some time since downloading, making copies, upgrading, and testing all take a bit of time. The sole problem that I have is that a bunch of properties used by a plugin i use are deprecated. I tired to look at it, but it’s things I have no clue on, so I don’t really want to modify it.

• Created a splash screen. On of the main reasons I switched to Unity 5.5 is that there’s been an overhaul of the splash screen tools. You might know that unity forces the free users to show their logo at start. It’s completely fair. But the problem was that the splash screen showed “made with unity personal edition” this looked cheap for many people playing games. Now it’s the same “made with unity” with every version. Plus they added small tools to add you own logo as well. Even if the sprite placement and sizing was completely weird. Another cool thing of the 5.5 is that the line renderer is much better. And since I use it to display the hitbox, I’m happy.