Day 144: Today I did some stuff. But I’m on the end of the tasks for this sprint (and for this milestone). I guess if I worked a bit more I could’ve finished it today. But then what would I do on friday? No I kept a bit of balancing and then I’ll playtest it and fix the stuff that I notice.

Daily interesting stuff:

• Blog post on being overwhelmed in gamedev. I already liked to other articles of this blog. This one is also well written and full of good stuff.

• Reddit post, “How do you come up with ideas?”. I responded with “toilet or shower”. I’m a funny guy right? But more seriously having ideas is pretty easy. But maybe that’s just because I daydream all the time.

Tasks done:

• Implemented a debug mode in the minimap. It’s a simple bool that enables me to show all the map at start. It was easy to do. I already had this behaviour, but I had to go into the code and comment a line. Now it’s easier. And before you think that I’m working on completely useless things, know that I had a really good reason to do this. This reason is the second task (that I really did in parallel with this one).

• Kinda fixed a bug with the dungeon procedural generation. Let me explain. When I played the game yesterday, I had a weird thing once, I was blocked! This shouldn’t be possible. So I started by checking the dungeon directly (I have a debug tool to show all the dungeon). But I couldn’t reproduce the bug. Then I did the first task and checked with the mini map. I couldn’t reproduce it either. At this point I started to think that I was wrong and that I wasn’t blocked in game (or did I hope it was the case?). But just to be sure I checked what I believe could led to a problem in the generation. You see each room needs a to have its exits in its configuration. It uses a simple relative coordinate data. And this data is automatically found by the room importer. But it’s not perfect. So I manually checked all the room exits. Yep the the 327 rooms. Needless to say (I love this expression), it was boring. But I found three errors. So I marked the bug as resolved, and I pray that I won’t come across it again (but I’m keeping an eye open just in case).

• Added an header to each upgrade category. Before, when you selected a category, the shop would open and just show a list of the available upgrades. Now It has a nice header that shows the description of that category. I did it to write it clearly that the “research” category just unlocks other upgrades. It was easy to do. The system that powers the shop was flexible enough to change that without trouble.

• Fixed the achievement notification. Ok I broke it yesterday, so it shouldn’t count. You see, yesterday I made that the “unlocked stamp” in the achievement UI was updated in game. And when looking at the notification UI, I noticed a weird direct call to the achievement UI. So I deleted it, and thought that past me was stupid. But it turns out that the notification UI uses the same component as the achievement UI. Because it’s so similar (just some text and image). So the direct call made sense. I just put it back to fix my problem.

• Tuned stuff. I really suck at this. I have no idea how to do it so that the game is more enjoyable. So I just try to change things based on the feeling I have from when I played the game. I made the achievement harder, the enemies in other zones give more money, there’s more bombs, the upgrade shop has higher prices, and I divided the ship’s life by two.

• Got a phone call from Ubisoft. It was just a call to schedule another interview and coding test. But it was still stressing as hell. But this time I managed to keep the control of my voice, so I guess it’s an improvement. Also good news, the interview will be on skype, so I don’t have to go to paris for it. Honestly I’m surprised to be at this stage of the recruitment process. Each time I thought they would never contact me again. Now I still going from the principle that I won’t get the job. But thanks to that, worst case scenario: I can get better at interviews. Best case scenario: a kickass job. Ok that’s a lousy argument, but I managed to convince myself (at least at 65%).