Day 147: Today, it’s a bit weird. It was actually a two part day. You see, yesterday, while I was cooking dinner, I realized that I have a ton of things to do for tomorrow (which is now today). So I decided to get back to work and try to have a finished beta version. So today’s day actually started yesterday around 20:00 then I went to sleep at 00:30 and got back to work at 16:00 today. But tonight people are coming for my roommate’s birthday, and I’m going to take this occasion to playtest my game, so that’ll also be work.

No daily interesting stuff today. I didn’t have time to check reddit (which you should do on your own BTW).

Tasks done:

• Improved the end game. When my roomate got to beat the last boss, I saw a lot of problems with the end game. In all fairness, I have to say that I didn’t really tested it in the game before. Si what did I do? Well first, I change how you would go to the end scene. Instead of brutally cutting the game and move you to the cut scene, I actually hijacked the “start” button of the most wanted screen. You know the screen that appear when you beat a boss to show you that you beat a boss? Well when it’s the last boss, instead of just closing and continuing the game, it moves you to the end game. Then I fixed some bugs. Then I added a button to return to the main menu. Yeah, before, I just assumed everyone would alt-F4 it. But that’s so unprofessional. Now you can hit “start” and go back to the main menu. Finally I made sure that after the end credit, you can still play the game. Hitting play will continue just as if you died right after killing the last boss (except that you didn’t get any money).

• Added some “tips” in the death screen. I thought that some features of the games weren’t used enough. So I added a sentence in the death screen to “talk” to the player. It’s 50% advices, 50% passive aggressive taunts. That wasn’t difficult to do, but I like it. Plus, how else are people going to know there’s a colorblind mode?
  Fixed a bug where the pause menu would open when you pressed start in the death screen to continue the game. I don’t exactly remember how I solved it (it was late). I think I used a new event to prevent the pause from opening.

• Added a visual feedback when an upgrade is maxxed. Before, having the maximum number of an upgrade would just show the “unavailable” feedback. But now, it shows another image. This is mainly so that you can see what weapon you have currently equipped. Yes because weapons are considered like upgrades, but with only a maximum number of one.

• Made that the selection feedback of the UI element is more evident. Before, I used a light blue. But my colorblind roommate could barely see it. So I used a more flashy color.

• The special bar now only fills to the current mana ratio. Let me explain. This bar was actually just a feedback to show the reloading of the special power. Just like the cooldown bar. But it also showed the current mana in a text inside the bar. So it was a bit weird to see the bar full when you had only 10% of your mana. To fix it, I used a simple trick. I still fills it when you’re in cooldown, but it only fills until the mana ratio left. So for example if you have 50% mana, the bar goes from 0 to 50% and is at 50% when the cooldown is over.

• Made better quit buttons. Before, I only had one quit button in the pause menu. But there was no way to return to the main menu nor to quit from the main menu. So now, the pause menu returns to the main menu, and the main menu quits the game.

• Fixed a weird bug with the save deletion. If you deleted the save from the main menu, it would completly fuckup the game. That was because the save creation is actually done at the start the of main menu. So if you delete the save after, it’s never intialized. And that causes a lot of problems. So I fixed it. And I’m not proud of it. Instead of creating an event and doing things the proper way, I just reload the scene when you delete the save. I also once had a weird music bug then. The main music would spawn in the main menu. But I can’t reproduce it.

• Modified the way the ship selection list moves. There was a weird problem when there sometimes some a difference between the selected ship and the showed selected ship. That was because of animations. I didn’t notice that if you moved fast enough, you could fuck up the display. So I refactored my code (which was a bit weird to be honest), and made a more robust solution.