Day 66: Today I thought I would be more productive. I was wrong. I just didn’t managed to get much done. I didn’t even finished the ship selection menu. When I see what I’ve done today, I have trouble believing I actually spent the whole day “working”. I couldn’t code straight. I knew what I wanted to do. I knew how to do it. But I just couldn’t. That was weird. I just couldn’t stay focused more than 5 minutes. Then I would go waste time on the net. And when I forced myself to not do that, I would just daydream. I’m not used to that. Usually I can focus whenever I want. And getting focused is almost instant. All that to say that tomorrow, I’ll try something new. I’m taking a day off. I wasn’t sure it was the right solution. But that way I’ll know if that works or not. All that to say I didn’t do much. But I should still say what I did or try to do, so today I:

• Worked on the ship selection menu. Yesterday I thought that I would finish that in the morning. I was wrong. At the end of the day I didn’t get much further. I have the start of a new animation. And that’s pretty much it. I even tried a method where I write pseudo code comments to know what I need to do, and then implementing it. It’s really simple code too. Just some custom animations. But It was like running on a treadmill.

• Looked at how to save stuff. The thing about this menu, is that it has a lot of implications on multiple features. Well actually it just shows data from multiple features. But since these features don’t exist yet, it’s like doing the UI has a lot of dependencies. One of them was saving. I need to have the current data like “is this ship unlocked?”. I thought about multiple solutions. One that I liked was to have a ScriptableObject for all the static data. And one for the game save. The thing is you can’t put persistent data in a ScriptableObject outside Unity editor. So you can’t use it as a save file. But what I want to do is a bit different. I want to still use a binary save file. But load the data at start and put it into a ScriptableObject. That way saved data is accessed like the GameData: Through direct references set in the editor. I did a quick test to see if I could put data into a ScriptableObject while in build mode. But I had weird bugs. The linked object was there in the editor, then was simply null in the builds. Later I founded out that the object was being corrupted for an unknown reason. Then I decided to leave it at that and go back to the UI because I was just messing around.

• Did a brainstorm with my roommate about ships types, powers and upgrades. Unlike last time, it was more efficient. Having defined a “box” enabled use to think inside and outside it. In total I have like 5 pages of stuff. I need to put this in organized digital documents before I can say that the designs tasks are over. But honestly this is the most productive thing I did today.

• Vaguely followed the train jam ticket sales. I really don’t have enough money to participate, but it felt somewhat good to see the tickets becoming sold out (in one hour). Felt a little like I’m part of it. A friend of mine went crazy and bought a ticket. That’s so cool, I really envy him (but not his wallet).