Day 57: Today I started the new sprint. Yesterday I thought this would be focused on the player. But while thinking about it, I realized that there was too much stuff more important to do. So this sprint is the “Make it work sprint”, I’ll work like I’m in crunch mode (test, then improvement of the most urgent), but without the overwork time.This should enable me to have a good pre alpha version by next week. There’s a reason I’m in a hurry, but I’ll talk about that later. Today I:

• Planned the tasks for the sprint. Since this sprint is more open ended, I don’t have all the tasks, but I tried to write as many as I could. I took them from the trello backlog, the alpha feature list, and from testing the game itself.
  Read a post on reddit about someone asking advice to convince his/her mom to let him/her go to a Gamedev University. And everyone was saying of much better a CS degree was. But I strongly disagree. I think that to know how to make games, you have to actually make games. Theoretical knowledge is important, but when you know what you want to do, I’m convinced that practical experience is way more important. I’m completely biased since I went to a game dev specific course. But I really don’t regret it. I wouldn’t be near what I do today if I went through a more traditional path. To comfort my vision I re-read this set of articles by Andy Gavin (Co-creator of Crash Bandicoot) (BTW his site is great). In these, he advise newcomers to start with an interpreted language first for example. But enough rant!

• Modified the “save room to dungeon” tool so that it could work with multiple selection. That way I select all the rooms, hit F7, and boom it’s done.
  Realized that the room I did in Tiled have the y axis pointing down, while Unity has it pointing up… This of course fucked up my dungeon generator script… This is the difference between having a feature work in test environment vs in real life. The fact that for me a feature is done only when it works for its final users (be it game devs or players) is something I’m really proud of. When working with other devs, one of the most annoying thing is hearing “But it works in my tests”. I don’t care. The feature exists because it needs to solve a specific problem not because it works in a test… Having a game design background really helps on this (I lied when I said enough rant).

• Modified all the rooms to work with the dungeon. I didn’t want to modify the dungeon. It would be weird to change the axis. So instead I did a script that added the room height to the y pos of each child of the room (TiledMap object and enemy container). That way, the room origin is at 0,0 in Unity. As for the axis, I don’t really care. The tiled map is static and the enemies move accordingly to Unity coordinates. I also had to modify the exits data manually. And since I already had to this before because my automation script bugs. I had to do it twice! That was boring.

• Made sure the dungeon work normally again. I used this occasion to add a debug bool to show the whole dungeon. And thus bypassing the crucial optimization of showing only the neighboring rooms I also had to do minor modifications to the data.

• Got confirmation for my IndieCade Europe volunteer participation. I signed up a few month ago. And now I have an excuse to go to Paris and attend this event for “free”. I took some time to organize the trip. Finding a way to get there as cheaply as possible took some time. I looked at trains, carpooling, buses, lowcost trains etc… In the end I opted for the bus. It costed me 39 euros total instead of at least 80 by train. The major downside is time. It takes 8 hours to go and 8 to return… But at least there’s electrical outlets so I’ll be able to work. I also signed up for “Show and Tell” it’s a thing where you can showcase your game for two hours. This is why I’m in a rush to have a playable version by september the 17th.

• Realized my game is actually fun to play! When I got the dungeon generation working, I of course tested it. And then I got all the feelings I wanted for this game. Just like when I play Do DonPachi. I was so happy, it’s really a big win to get to a point where what I wanted in my head actually materialize in real life. Naturally there’s a ton of stuff that isn’t right for now. The main problem is the progression part and the player part. But it was awesome to actually have fun playing my game!