Day 157: Today wasn’t really productive. Just like I said yesterday, the closer I get to the end, the less motivated I get. Maybe it’s because I’m afraid of stopping to work, and releasing the game like it is. After all, after that point, I won’t get to say “this is a dev version” anymore. It will be a real reflection of my work, and in a sense, myself.

Daily interesting stuff:

• Article, “going from 0 to 1”. It’s all about how publishing your first game is so much harder than rest and stuff like that. I don’t know if it’s weird, but I don’t find it that difficulty to make your first game. I used to think that people said that because it meant “first commercially successful game”. But it turns out it doesn’t. For most, it’s just “has menus and can get from the beginning to the end without crashing”. I made two game like that in the first two weeks of game school alone. Two super simple and short games. But games nonetheless. And I’m not some kind of alien at all. I mean by that definition, a game jam game counts. That’s two days of work. Of course I’m talking in the “professional” mindset. It doesn’t take into account at all the hobby situation.

• Reddit post, ‘what makes a bad game”. Funny things about comments on this post, is that they’re way too generic. That was a bit weird, everyone has it’s pet peeve. And is commenting thinking about a specific thing that is hard to get if you don’t have the same game in mind.

Tasks done:

• Added a life bar for the bosses. That pretty much all I did today. But it wasn’t that easy, I swear. Just showing some information is easy, doing it in a pleasing way, on the other hand… I particularly suck at making things look good. But I think I managed to do something not so bad. I used the laser sprite as the base for the filling, and it looks cool. I added some skulls icon on both end, to make it look cooler. The icon the same that I use in the mini map to display “boss rooms”. But what I spend the most time on is animations. I tweaked and tweaked until it looked good. Also I finally understood the advice that “as a gamedev inspiration comes from everywhere”. Well to animate the life bar (opening and closing), I took inspiration from the “Tower of terror” from Disney Land. In this attraction, you get on the top of the lift, then the “doors” open, and you see the whole park from really high. Then you fall, but just a few inches. Then nothing for a short time, then it’s freefall. That’s how I did the closing animation. It tilts, shakes, re titles, falls a bit (shake) and free falls. The opening, has a lot of bouncing. Overall, I’m pretty proud of this feature.

• Started working on the balancing of the game. It’s time, I get around this. It’s supposed to be a “balancing and polish sprint” and I only started the balancing at the of the day, on thursday. So, this balancing, this time, I decided to go through a google sheet, instead of just trying to wing it, by putting almost random values. So I went on, and carefully put my data in a spreadsheet. I had a lot of trouble with formulas. Because, you see, in french, they decided that to represent a floating number we should use the comma “,” instead of the point “.”. And of course google create documents based on my language, so french by default. Not a big deal, until you realize that the comma is the most used separator in computers, so all the function in the formulas, well the documentation doesn’t work. You use semicolon instead. And after a lot yelling, and incomprehension, I found out how to turn it into an english spreadsheet. From there it was smooth sailing. Well, except that I have no idea how much money the players get in the game, it depends on too many parameters. And I shouldn’t base it on my own performance… So I’ll end up putting things at random once again. But I’ll make sure the upgrades are less expensive this time.