Day 118: Today was really unproductive. It’s one of these days where I can’t seem to maintain work focus. I kept trying, and kept being sucked into reading other things on the web. And when I didn’t went on the web, I just end up being lost in my thoughts, staring blankly at the screen. I hate this, because I really waste my time. I end up wasting so much time trying to force myself to do an underwhelming amount of work. So I decided to stop the carnage early and go grocery shopping instead. At least that’s useful…

Daily interesting stuff:

• Reddit post, “Mid-Mortem”. I totally TL;DR but it seemed interesting though.

• Reddit post about Steam Greenlight being replaced by a direct fee. Here you go, you probably heard this, as you know, EVERY dev is talking about it. I looked a lot about this. My take now is that money can’t define the value of a game. I think that the main argument that if your game can’t make X amount of money then it should not be on steam is wrong. Steam represent a HUGE part of digital marketplace. I couldn’t find any stats but I’m pretty sure all the other stores combined don’t come even close to steam. And because your game isn’t making a given amount of money, it shouldn’t try to reach people? That’s crazy. IMO if a game on steam is enjoyed by as low as one person, it deserves to be on Steam. Barriers to creation aren’t the solution. Filtering is. Plus it’s too easy to judge the fee for your situation. But for others it might be an insanely different value. Imagine having to gamble a yearly salary just to be on a store.

• Article that has the same opinion as I have. Due to the confirmation cognitive bias, I’m inclined to post those.

• Another article of the same opinion. I post these because I’m not the best to express my thoughts. So I link to others that shares them better.

Tasks done:

• Fixed a bug where is was impossible to rebind the inputs from the main menu. I was disappointed, it was super easy to fix. It was just some Unity stuff I forgot to add. 5 minutes of Drag & Drop later and it was done.

• Made that the enemies can move from a room to another. Well they were already able to physically move from one room to another. But the problem was that the enemies are stored in their respective rooms. So when one enemy was following the player to other rooms, then, when the previous rooms gets deactivated (to save perf). The enemy that you potentially see is also deactivated in front of your eyes. Weird heh? To fix that I had to make that when the enemy enters another room, it would be be stored in the new room instead of the old room. It’s not a complicated feature to do. But it does involve a few things that drove me nuts. I can’t see any good way of handling global data. To do this feature, I have to access the dungeon map. This map is a two dimensional array that stores where the rooms are. But that data need to be accessible to the enemies, the player (who also changes rooms), and the mini map. How do I do that gracefully? I don’t know every solution I see (and there’s a couple of them) seem ugly. I end up using Unity built in service locator (FindObjectWithTag) to save a ref to the dungeon. Then in the dungeon script, I exposed a public function to get a room based on the world position. This function just converts world pos to map pos and does a lookup in the map to return the room if there’s one. But I’m not satisfied. I means that enemies and player always asks for the dungeon to see which rooms they’re in. It’s weird. I hate this kind of situation. I feel like I have no idea what I’m doing. That’s why I need to get a job in a game studio. I really need to be able to rely on other to know if my code is bad or not…