Day 135: Today was alright in term of productivity. I was afraid it would be bad since the symptoms of laziness I had yesterday. But it turned out to be okay. Actually it’s 15:19 right now, so I still feel a bit guilty. But I’ve done all I wanted for this sprint, and I don’t like to mix different sprint in the same day. Plus it’s friday, so I’m calling it early today!

Daily interesting stuff:

• Reddit post, “how do you contain your excitement?”. I was tempted to say “What excitement?”, since I’m dead inside. But then during the day, I got to play my game with all the new content I painfully made. And it was great. So yeah I guess I had a bit of excitement.

• Reddit post, “best advice for starting web game”. Since I did quite a few web based games, I thought It was interesting to comment. Yes I’m not just a reddit lurker. I advised to go as simple as possible with vanilla JS or Pixi.js. Seriously who thinks it’s a good idea to have a beginner struggle with a rigid and complicated framework (like phaser)?

• Reddit post, is gamedev jobs worth it?. Short answer, it you like making games more than anything yes. If not, no.

Tasks done:

• Fixed a bunch of bugs with the new content. “I finally get to test all the content I made!”, well, that’s what I thought when starting the day. But before, I had to link all the rooms to the dungeon. That’s super easy, I have a tool to do that for me. But then bam weird bugs.

  • First a zone 2 room was in the first zone. That was because when coping rooms to other zone (to have easy content), I forgot to set the zone index of those rooms. So I did that.

  • Then some were in “debug mode”. That was weird since the tool to link them to the dungeon makes sure to set the debug mode to false. It turns out that I does set the mode to false, but it doesn’t mark the prefab as changed. So it appears well and all, UNTIL I reopen Unity (or make a build). That’s tricky. Instead of marking the rooms as dirty, I fixed the tool that saves the rooms in the first place. So that no room saved can be in debug mode.

  • Some rooms had various problems. Most of the time it was visible because the room would not have any enemies. That was weird because every room has three possible enemy configuration, and that no room apart from the starting one is empty. The cause of this was different each time. One time it was because of a duplicated component. Another, it was because of an error in the config. You know, stuff like that. So I put the dungeon in debug to see all the rooms at once it was easier to spot bad rooms that way.

• Fixed a big bug in the dynamic room content. It’s the system I use to make sure each enemy is instantiated from the model, and not just saved into the room. The problem was that as I also use it as a tool during the content making process, I didn’t checked the changes in play mode, or in the standalone build. And of course, everything was broken. In the editor the enemies would get respawn each time you go back to a room, and in the build, there simply wasn’t any enemies… But fixing that was quite easy. I just modified the behaviour a bit while taking into account the fact that it could be either an editor tool, a editor play mode preview, or a real game play mode.

• Started planning the next sprint. It’s the “Polish sprint”. And no, I won’t learn polish. Even though I’d love to work for CD projekt. No, it’s just a nice way to say “Do everything you can before the deadline because every feature left will be heartlessly cut”. But was too long to fit in the trello card.

Sprint end: This concludes the “Content sprint”. I now have a lot more content. It’s not as much as I wanted when I started this project, but I think it’s still pretty decent. I have 325 rooms in 4 zones. Each room has 3 different enemies configurations. Each configuration is a bunch of the 18 possible enemies. Let’s just say that all this make a LOT of bullets…

What went wrong:

• It was soooooo boring. Really I thought it was the worst sprint to do. I really wanted to quit and do something either more pleasant, or more usefull.

• I had to cut some tasks to meet the deadline. That required a bit of flexibility in what I consider content or not. But if I don’t think too much about it, I’m at peace with myself.

What went right:

• I freaking did it. I know, I know, I write this at each sprint. But this time, it feels more like an achievement.

• The content is pretty cool. I got to play it today, and the game is now much much harder. And that’s more fun too. I yelled at my screen when I died, and even I wanted to keep playing. I think it’s the first game I made that I actually enjoy playing.