Day 143: Today was productive I guess. It’s hard to say, since I finished early. But I think I made a lot of things. I guess I’ll know more based on the length of today’s log. Oh hey, also big news, I started playing an MMO. I don’t do that usually, but my roommate started one that I like so, I thought I should give it a try. Even if I still hate the subscription based model.

Daily interesting stuff:

• Reddit post, “advices to an aspiring game dev”. Ok this sounds like the cheesy usual stuff. But this person asked for what advice would you give to your past self. And of course game dev love talking about themselves so there’s a lot of answers with a lot of insights.

• Stackoverflow survey. Super cool stuff for the statistic addicts.

Tasks done:

• Improved the end game cutscene. At first I wanted to do a complete overhaul and make it look like the start cut scene. But I launched it, and honestly I like how it is. I found it funny enough. So I just made some debugging and improvements. I changed one or two sentences and made better fade in/out animation timing. It works well.

• Did a big spell check on all the game. I used some online tools to do this. And painfully copy pasted texts back and forth. I found a lot of things that went wrong, so I guess it was an important task. I’m pretty sure there’s still a lot of problems. But hell that’s what a beta version is for no?

• Played the game. But really played it, from the beginning and in build mode. I’m seeing a lot of problems. I played around half an hour before being too bored to continue. Maybe it’s just because I know the game perfectly. Or it’s just because my game is boring. I noticed so many things, and I tried to write it all down. After that I end up with a long trello todo list.

• Fixed a bug where the start button wouldn’t close the pause menu. That was a real problem since it could prevent you from doing anything in the game except from “alt-F4” it. I was a stupid problem too. Yesterday, I had a problem where when the most wanted screen would pop, you had to press start to continue. But that also put the game in pause. So I stupidly added to the pause open condition that it can’t work if the time scale is at 0. What I didn’t knew was that it also prevent the pause menu to be closed. So I just moved the condition to be on the opening only.

• Did a few misc improvement. Those were the things I noted from my game testing session. I didn’t made any game balance change yet though. Ok I still have a few lines left for today’s log so here’s a list of those improvements:

  • Longer splash screen. It put it to five seconds instead of two.

  • Tried to have a better logo. But the Unity default system just stretches it and it looks awful because I don’t a have a high resolution logo :(

  • Added sounds in the setting menu, and in general checked that each selectable element made a sound when selected.

  • Saved the current scene when in the tutorial. If not if you quit during the tuto, you would have to go through the intro cut scene again.

  • Put an invincible turret in the tutorial. It’s to avoid the bug that if you kill all the enemies without dying, you’re blocked.

  • Replaced the word “enter” by “space” in the texts that says the key to continue the game. I did that because enter doesn’t continue the game but space does.

  • Fixed the “unlocked stamp” on the achievement UI. I just listened to the right event and made the appropriate change.