Day 67: Today was “I took friday off and had a three days weekend but now I have to get back to work” day. I had no idea if it would be productive. I have mixed feelings. On one hand it was much easier to work and get focused. On the other hand, I don’t feel I’ve accomplished much. But coding was a pleasure again, and not a pain like last thursday. So I’d say it was worth it. On a completely unrelated note, the bakery didn’t have any tradition baguette so I had to take a “baguette à l’ancienne” (typical french struggle). It was surprisingly good, I might take this more often. Anyway, today I:

• Finally finished all the design brainstorm I had laying around. I spoke about it the few last days. First I tried doing a brainstorm with my roommate, but I couldn’t get anywhere due to a laziness overload. Then I clarified the features I wanted. Then we did a second brainstorm that went much better. And today I took all the notes and made real digital documents out of it. This was harder than I expected. Because while re-reading the notes, I realized we forgot a lot of stuff. We didn’t even talked about the bombs. So by writing the documents I actually changed/improved/Invented new stuff. In the end the intergame features works like this:

  1. Select any ship type you want and that you have unlocked. But there’s a catch. Each ship is available in a finite stock. This stock replendish slower than the game runs, so you can’t take the same ship every time.

  2. Select a ship layout. Each layout is a twist of the ship type. It has its own power and different characteristics. To unlock new layouts you must complete some achievements with the ship (who said FTL? I heard you!).

  3. Upgrade your ship. Upgrades are what enables you to raise your characteristics (life, damage, mana, gold etc…). Each ship reacts differently to the upgrades. That way you might have to tailor the upgrades to the ship you’re using. Upgrades can be deactivated a reactivated for a small price. There’s also a ship max weight. Which mean you can’t have all the upgrades at the same time.

  4. Unlock new stuff. Unlike upgrades those are one time only.you can unlock new types, weapons types, and other stuff.

  5. Choose your weapons.

• Worked on the ship selection menu. I wanted to finish it today, but I had trouble to start. Also I wanted to finish later and finish it, but I read an interesting productivity tip. This tip says to not finish stuff between two sessions. That way you’ll have less starting inertia. So I wanted to try it (and have an excuse to procrastinate). Anyway, when I started this task again, I had a completely fresh eye. And of course I tried different things to solve what I already did. I mostly tried solutions until I remembered why I could use this solution. But I still managed to greatly improve the solution I use. Since I want the menu to be responsive (at least suit the resolutions from QHD to 720p), I can’t use some of the pre-made Unity UI. So I had to do custom animations. I just interpolate on an animation curve in a coroutine. But since there’s multiple independent stuff to animate, I had some code duplication. And I don’t like that. So I did a simple Animator component, that has a dictionary of animations params and returns the appropriate coroutine when asked. That way I can time I prepare the routine in the Animator and execute it in the behavior scripts. I did this so I could time my coroutines when I want (like doing an animation after another).