Day 50: Today it was hard to get back to work. I spent my entire weekend on Skyrim, and it was awesome. I played 25 hours, drank 2L of coke and ate mostly chips. So waking up monday morning, to realize that I have to actually work was… unpleasing. But since I’m a responsible person, I didn’t ditched work and I was actually quite productive. Today I:

• Asked a question in marketing monday on reddit gamedev. I asked if anyone knew about a tool I could use to post my logs. Yes because I’m considering changing the place where I rant write everyday. I got one response, that told me my post wasn’t clear enough. And indeed it wasn’t clear enough of what tool I expected.

• Implemented some enemies. It turns out that the tools I did in the last sprint weren’t as finished as I thought. Unbelievable right? So when I started using them with real world cases, I encountered some problems. It wasn’t anything major, and fixed the issues quickly. It was actually quite pleasing to have a bit of coding to do. Since most of the enemies implementations are just using graphical tools. I implemented four enemies:

  • Satellite: it’s an enemy that gravitate around the player. I had some problems with the collision avoidance. But it was mainly because I forgot how to use this tool. Funny thing about that behaviour, it actually come from a bug. When I first implemented the target movement, I added an “angle offset” that add an angle to the target vector. What I didn’t know was that if I set values like 90 degrees, and since the direction is updated at each frame. The final direction would actually be like a “gravity” movement. I liked it so I kept it.

  • Fixed dist: it’s an enemy that goes toward the player, but stops at a distance. It shoots three bullets to the player. I actually realized while making this enemy that I couldn’t make this behaviour. I have an offset, that enables me to pinpoint a location around the player, but that’s not exactly the same. So I quickly modified the tool to enable it.

  • Flee: it’s an enemy that goes away from the player, while shooting at it. It was really easy, I just had to use a target movement with a 180 degrees offset.

  • Shotgun tank: it’s an enemy that goes slowly towards the player at stops at a fixed distance. It shots a shot gun when the player is in range. I had trouble to get something I like with this enemy. I worked on the bullet pattern for a while. But in the end even if alone it’s not really dangerous, put two and some satellites and you’ve got a serious challenge.

• Looked at some resources for marketing. I read half of this list. It’s really good, since it doesn’t just says “hey websites are important, build one”, it actually give you resources on how to do it.

• Searched a way to have a centralized information place for the game. Right now I only have the itch.io page. It’s great for description and builds. But it doesn’t provide a log section. So I looked at what was used: tumblr, blogger, Indiedb and gamejolt, and custom websites. Custom HTML5 websites seems to be the most used way. But I don’t really have time to set up one right now (even if I used a template). So I opted for gamejolt which is like itch but has a devlog option. But some time around the alpha release I’ll do a real website.

• Set up a gamejolt page. It’s probably where you’re reading this. The description was long to write. I had to adapt the itch description which is based on HTML to gamejolt markup. And in the middle of it, the focus was lost, I hit backspace and whooops went back to the previous page and lost all my work… But I made it. And now I have a more serious place to write my logs.