Day 145: Today, it’s kinda late. It’s funny though, because I finished all I wanted for this sprint around noon. But then I was curious about something and started implementing a big feature. More on that later. The important thing to remember is that I love gamedev so much that I can willingly add myself work on a friday.

Daily interesting stuff:

• Reddit post, someone whining about how unfinished games are these days. That’s not really insightful but I found it funny.

• Reddit post about the policy in some game companies that prevent side projects. I heard it before, but seeing all these comments made it really real.

• Gamasutra article, why video game matters especially in hard times. This was a moving piece. And I’m not one to say that easily.

• Youtube channel, CGP Grey. I kinda knew this before. But I really looked into it only today. And I must say that this is mind blowing. It opens so many doors. Kurzgesagt is also awesome. It was hard to go back to work after these.

Tasks done:

• Made that the treasure chest contains more money. This was a really quick balancing change.

• Balanced the ship stock feature. There was way too much stock. You play like ten runs before running out of a ship. At first I struggled to balance it. But then I had an idea. Instead of resplendishing all the ships at start by a value, I do this for all the ship EXCEPT the one selected. So when you don’t take a ship it re-stocks itself. But when you use it it doesn’t. This is much easier to balance. Then I just said that you have a max stock of two by ship config. And that each run replendish 0.5 ship. So you can play two run then have to wait at least two run to take the same ship. It really encourages the player to choose other ships. Another thing is that different layout of a ship count as a separate ship. So it also encourages you to unlock the achievement if you want the same type of ship. I have no idea if any of this makes sense.

• Fixed a small bug where the special power UI wouldn’t work in the tutorial. It was happening because the tutorial doesn’t spawn a ship, it uses a pre-existing one in the scene. So it doesn’t launch the weapon creation event. Which then the UI can’t catch. Which thus prevents it from working correctly. So I just modified it to work solely with the power use event.
  Played the game, and fixed some things. I can’t remember what I fixed. But I can tell you that I raged at my game, so that’s cool. It was the intended feeling. I quite like the current curse word per minute rate.

• Was bored, look at color blindness. Started making a color blind mode for my game. I know, I know, it seems like I don’t really have a sense of priorities. But around 10% of the male population has some form of color blindness (much less for women). Also my roommate (and first playtester) is color blind. So I have a first hand test subject to develop it. So I thought “fuck it” and just made it. It really simple, I just change the colors of the enemies, bullets and UI, to more color blind friendly colors. I also downloaded a color blind simulator from the Unity asset store. Considering my game, I don’t have much more to do. I don’t really have elements conveying information solely based on the color, and the color pallet fits the two most common color blind types.

• Made my roommate playtest my game. When I started, it was 18:50, now it’s 20:43… I have a long list of things to fix. But he likes it a lot (he’s still playing). So I guess that’s a win. There wasn’t a lot of bugs too! I’m pretty proud about it. Seeing other play my game make me see it as a professional game. That’s cool. Plus at least one person enjoyed the game, so I can say that it wasn’t a waste of time after all.

Announcement: Since I have an interview and coding test with ubisoft next week, I’ll be taking a few days “off” to work on some interview questions, and brush my skills in general. So there won’t be any new entry for some time. But don’t worry I should release the beta of the game right on time (end of the month).