Day 152: Today I’m still sick, and I’m still working. I can’t tell if I’m getting better or worse. It wasn’t the most productive day ever, but I think I did a decent amount of work. I’m a bit hungry now, but that has nothing to do with my work. So I don’t really know why I wrote that. Maybe it’s because I write this log without doing in curating in my head.

Daily interesting stuff:

• Reddit post about valve discussed changes. This is the same topic as yesterday. But the discussion was much more furnished.

• Reddit post about the budget of old videogames. Much like today’s indies, first budget in games were most likely tiny.

• Reddit post about “hidden rng modifications”. Stuff like assuring the player always gets enough legendary equipment and so on.

Tasks done:

• Finished the bug hunting. Well I didn’t find many bugs, so I had to settle down with improvements.Oh and when I say “hunting” I’m really saying “seek & destroy”. Here’s a list of all the changes:

  • The main music of the game was too loud. So I tone it down a bit. At first I wanted to modify the track directly in Audacity. But I don’t have the mp3 encoder… So I just adjusted the volume in Unity to have a maximum of 75% with this song.

  • Checked the music transition between the intergame and the main game. It was okay, I just misheard it. Maybe the transition is a bit fast.

  • Sometimes I felt like the ship was really slow. For a moment I thought it was just my imagination. It was hard to notice. But then I found that when you use some weapons you’re slowed down (which is normal), but if you switch weapons while firing, the slow down stays (which is not normal). After a bind of wandering in the code base, I found out that it was a simple bool that I forgot to set. It fixes the problem and even betters the weapon switching. Now you don’t have to stop firing and fire again to activate the weapon. If you’re firing and you switch weapon, the new weapon will fire automatically.

  • Added a “bomb collectible”. Like the mana potion and the health potion, it replenishes your bomb stock. I thought that just having two bombs for the whole run wasn’t cool. So now, you can drop more bombs in game. It was pretty straightforward to make, it’s much like the potions and relies on the practical event system I have. I even made the sprite myself! Really, and it looks like a bomb too! Ok, it’s not beautiful at all, but I’m still proud of it.

  • Augmented the radius of the bomb. I thought it was a bit small so I cranked it up.

• Implemented a new upgrade. You can now reduce your cooldown. It will raise the maximum time you can fire before being in cooldown mode, and also reduce the cooling time. It’s limited to 5 upgrades for a total of 50% less cooldown. I also took this occasion to change something with the saveIndex of the upgrades. When I looked back at it, I couldn’t understand what the saveIndex was exactly. I remembered it was an ID corresponding to the index in the save file. But I didn’t remembered was was the rules about those ID. It turns out that the ID had to be the same of the order by which they are arranged in the game data. So if you wanted to add an upgrade in the 9th position, you had to shift all the indexes after that. And it was really painful. So I changed it. Now the “saveIndex” variable in the upgrades decides for the index in the save file. Which is much more logical. To do this I just had to use an array instead of a list in the save.