Day 156: Today is one day closer to the end. It’s weird how now, that I’m almost done, I have even more trouble to motivate to work. Or maybe it’s due to the week-end spend socializing. This always drains my battery. Even if it’s some fun things, like doing localization for Mozilla. I just feel tired if I don’t have a day or two quit at home without work. I guess I’m too used to flexible hours and 40 hours/week max.

Daily interesting stuff:

• Xkcd comic. You know it’s a big scientific discovery when it gets on commit strips.

• Article about key reselling.

• Minute earth video about “why do rivers curve?”. It was cool. But I gotta say, as a non-native speaker, it was hard to grasp, even with subtitles on.

Tasks done:

• Fixed a bug with the LocalizationManager. When there was a scene change, I would get errors. So I went on to ensure that only one instance of the localization is present. And that this instance never gets destroyed even though scene changes. There’s a method for that: DontDestroyOnload. But then I had a lot of weird stuff happening. Some variables weren’t set for example. Sometimes it was just me being stupid (yes non-static variables are dependant on instances duh). But there’s a weird thing about DontDestroyOnLoad. Is that if your object is into another objet, it may be destroyed anyway. The super weird thing is that I have another object that needs to not be destroyed. And it works fine. And it’s in the same hierarchy state. But this one doesn’t get destroyed. Weird.

• Reduced the range of the magnet of the coins. Yeah well, someone in the recent playtest mentioned that it was a bit big. You would attract coins from really far away. I wasn’t sure about it. So I decided to try it. It turned out okay. On one hand, you have to spend a little extra time to collect the coins. On the other hand, you don’t have the feeling of being aggressed by coins and it raises their psychological value (more work = more precious). So I decided to keep the change.

• Made that the difficulty is adapted depending on how you play in the tutorial. You see, something I noticed while playtesting it, is that some people never used a twin stick. Then, of course they struggle just to move and aim. So to them the game is way too punitive. And while you can already change the difficulty settings, not everyone is going to do it. If you get completely destroyed by the game, it’s highly likely that you’re going to quit immediately. So I did a thing that “spys” on you while you play the tutorial, it checks the time you’re taking, and the number of kills your making. Then it gets compared to the max or to an arbitrary “normal” value, and calculate your skill ratio. Then it modifies the difficulty settings based on that. And of course since, I want to be as transparent as possible, I made it that after the death screen, instead of going directly to the intergame, you’re shown the adjusted difficulty settings pane. That way, you can change it right here. And it’s directly under your nose. I have to confess that this whole feature feels more like a hack than anything else. It’s really ugly. But the project is almost over, and I need to get it done.

• Rounded the numbers in the ship text feedback. It was weird to see “+ 9.99998 hp”. I just casted the floats to ints.