Day 136: Today, it’s Monday again. I played Borderland 2 this weekend and it was really entertaining. Can’t wait to finish this log to get back to Pandora! Surprisingly, I thought today was a productive day. It didn’t start well, though. But I’m finally back to coding some stuff after three week of content. It feels great.

Daily interesting stuff:

• Blog post, how a small indie studio does its recruitment. Ok they seem a bit crazy, but the article was still informative.

• Reddit post, “Some people think our game is hard others don’t, what do we do?”. The comment were interesting stuff on difficulty in game in general.

• Article, “the dev cycle of doom”. This was a really good article. It describes symptoms of the “never finishing a game” disease. It was well written and full of good advices. The other articles linked on the same site are cool too.

Tasks done:

• Played the game. Yeah, it’s the “polish” sprint so it’s quite important. And no I’m not learning to speak polish in this sprint. And yes this is a really bad joke. So I played for around an hour. It’s cool, at least I like the game, so it’s still one person in the worst case. But I didn’t played it just for fun. No, I’m a professional, I don’t do that (although since I’m not making money you could argue on the “pro” aspect). I noted all the things I thought needed improvement. I noted all the bugs. And perhaps more importantly I have a better idea of the big picture of the game. That’s really helpful, because in polish sprint, things tend to get… messy. I often do a lot of small tasks to better the game, and that without any planning at all. So a big picture is essential.

• Planned the sprint a bit better. Know that I have a good idea of the state of the game, it was time to formalise the todo list a bit more. I added cards based on my post it notes, and fleshed out some checklist in too generic cards. Like the “tuning” tasks now has a checklist containing all the parts that need to be tuned for the beta. The difficulty levels taks is also more precise. But afterward, when working, I realized that it had a major drawback. Each time I would complete a task, I would check it in the checklist. But that made me open my browser. Which is full of internet, which in turn is full of distracting things. So I lost a bit of time like that.
  Fixed the bugs found when testing. Some weren’t even real bugs. As I was playing I sometimes had doubts about if feature really worked. But when I checked it turned out it worked well. That was stuff like the passive power that shows chest on the minimap, or some achievements. But a real bug was that the bosses would move and go toward the player even when the player isn’t in the boss room. And sometimes the bosses would manage to get out of their room to wreak havoc where they’re not supposed to. So I fixed that.

• Did some small improvements. Now the special power bar is shown empty when you don’t have enough mana to launch a power. Before It would be showed full, because the bar is just an indication of the cooldown of the power and not an indication of the mana left. That was weird when you didn’t have any mana left. I also put more space between the two achievements in the pause menu screen. It’s more readable that way. And finally I swapped the high score text and the score text in the main menu. I didn’t want to change the animation, so I just swapped the references to the objects in the script that manages the dynamic data. It’s ugly since the “High score” element shows the score and vice-versa.

• Started working on some difficulty levels. I already blown the length quota for today’s log, so I won’t get into too much details today. It’s over anyway. But I just have to add the use interaction, the system behind works. If you want to know more about it, I guess you’ll just have to come back tomorrow (or read the next entry if time has passed).