Day 58: Today I got a lot done. Or at least I believe I did. I’m not so sure actually. I also got a visit. Some time ago I signed up on sites to do cat sitting. And today one person who was interested by having her two cats kept for two weeks came by to see where I live. So in a few days, there will be two cats at home! I freaking love cats. They’re so awesome. Plus I’ll make a bit of money. Which is nice since it should cover the IndieCade expenses (around a hundred euros). Anyway apart from that, today I:

• Found an interesting article on reddit game dev. It’s about optimizing your website for journalists.

• Finished to fix the main scene. This includes fixing the soundManager data, changing the start room to a dedicated room, and pass the debug bool of the rooms to false. Also I just realized this now, but the collectibles sound fix I did in the enemies prefab is not active for the enemies in the room. This is due to the fact that I forgot to run my custom script to update enemies prefab in rooms prefab. I’ll do this tomorrow, but first I’ll have to modify it to work with multiple selection because I don’t want to do it for each prefab separately.

• Fixed a bug I had with the BulletFountains. I had a problem some times where an enemy fire rate was doubled. This was hard to reproduce but happens quite regularly throughout the game. It turned out it was a condition problem. The visibilitySwitching is triggered when there’s a visibility change, then it wait x seconds (to avoid switching at each frame when on the limit). Then passes the final state (visible or not) to the weapon which pass it to each BulletFountain. It works fine except when the enemy gets invisible then visible in the final state. In this case, the order to activate the fountains is given even though the fountain are already active. And there was no check what so ever. Once I knew what caused this bug, fixing it was trivial. Or it should’ve been. I spent more time than I should. I didn’t managed to see the branch flow efficiently, and I had to rewrite the condition multiple times. This should be trivial and done with closed eyes. And I didn’t managed to. This made me realize that I’m really not that experienced at all. But hey I made it work in the end, that’s what’s count right?

• Got the player weapons working again. I only had the test weapon before. Now I have the base weapons I had back then. I even upgraded them with the new cooldown feature.

• Watched “The art of screenshake” and “Juice it or lose it” to learn more about juiciness. I must say it was really eye opening. I also played Nuclear Throne and Steredenn (great games, buy them!) again with a fresh look on game feel. I took a lot of notes (like always on my post-its). I then created trello cards to make sure they wouldn’t get lost. I might not have the time to implement them all for IndieCade, but I’ll try to.

• Adapted the Knight and Barbarian player types to the new system. It was actually pretty easy. I just had to add a DamageDealer, and a ControllerMovement components. Also I change the shield sprite for the Knight.

• Made an UI for the weapon cool-down. Because it was really frustrating to have you weapon stop without knowing why. Know you can see where you are on the cool-down. And when you’re overheating, the bar is red and blinks. Contrary to the other UI which still used the outdated singleton, I used events. Well it’s not that pretty. Because I didn’t want to send consent events during cool-down, I passed some variables to a public getter and just created an event for the weapon activation. That way, the UI listens to it, and then has access to the required variables like the current timer. At least the Weapon doesn’t need to know the UI and there’s low chances of side effects thanks to the private setter.