Day 56: Today I thought all I needed to do was to finish the 25 rooms enemy configs. I was wrong. I forgot that there’s three other zones that need rooms and enemies… Even though I focus on the first zone for the alpha version, the other zones need to be there and show that zones are different.But spoiler alert, I still managed to finish the sprint today. Since your shivering with anticipation, no point in waiting more: today I:

• Did enemy configurations for the last 25 rooms for the first zone. I think there’s two rooms that have only one configuration so I did 48-50 configs. I had to do that quicker than I wanted. I just didn’t have the time to test them all and refine them. But it should be sadistic enough to be fun.

• Realized I need to do the other zones. I decided to put 25 rooms in each other zone. I fucked up while copying the files so it’s 24 rooms instead of 25. It’s the same rooms than the first zone except the color changes (blue, green and red).

• Did a small script to change the color of the rooms. I didn’t want to do this by hand. In the end I don’t know if I really saved time. But there was already way too much repetitive tasks to do today so I’m glad I did that. It’s a simple script that take an array of GameObject (easy to drag and drop in Unity because of the inspector lock feature). Then it executes in editor mode, and in update iterate through the GameObjects and find the MeshRenderer components. Then it just assign a new material (also set in Unity).

• Did enemy configurations for all the rooms of the other zones. That’s 72 rooms… I couldn’t do fresh new configs for every room though. I mostly just modified the configs to remove enemies not present in the zone and add new ones. Sometimes I did new configs. And sometimes I didn’t change the config at all. Thanks to that lazy technique I managed to finish right on time!

Sprint end

What went wrong:

• On this sprint there was a clear organization problem. I thought that just writing “do 50 rooms” would be precise enough. I was so wrong. I thought the work was over two times before actually finishing this sprint. And even then, I had to cut stuff.

• Too much repetitive work. Maybe packing all that content work in one time is not the best idea. Inspiration feels like a limited resource. When it’s depleted, it needs time to refuel…

What went right:

• I’m pretty glad I managed to stay professional and work all day while doing repetitive and sometime boring tasks. Which hard for me because when I code, I almost always find it interesting and not repetitive at all, so I’m not used to that kind of work.

• The game starts to emerge. It’s becoming fun to test. And some times when testing a room I got all the feelings I wanted to give to the player. Given the knowledge I have of this game (since I made it), being able to enjoy it is great!

Conclusion:
I have now a lot of rooms, with a lot of enemies inside. I can’t wait to test that in a full dungeon. But I had to put of important things like fixing the exit automation code. Also I have a big problem in that the new rooms have a top left anchor, while the previous rooms had a top bottom anchor. And my dungeon code can’t manage that right now. But I’ll deal with this after the next sprint. Which will be about the player mechanics (movement, shooting, progression, etc…).