Day 68: Today, I feel like I’m almost back to my top form. I got what I wanted done, I didn’t have much trouble to focus, and I didn’t felt bored. But I did feel stressed about the outcome of the project. Is it going to be fun? Are a decent number of person going to play it? Will I find a graphic artist? Will I find a publisher? Should I do some paperwork now? You know classic stressing stuff. It’s a good thing I don’t depend on this game sales to live. Anyway time to stop self-pity, and to start saying that today I:

• Finished the revamp of the ship selection menu. In my roadmap, I wrote that it would take two days to redo this and the upgrade ship menu. I only did the ship selection and it took four days… I completely underestimated the task. But I also didn’t wrote about the ships types design part, about the UI animations, the responsiveness etc… So I’d like to think I did this task in a more thoughtful manner than I originally planned. And it’s still not enough. There a lot of things I didn’t do yet. Like the actual data I need (descriptions, names, sprites, etc…).

• Looked for jobs. It’s not that I actually want to get one now. It’s just that I felt insecure and that I have no idea if I’ll be able to find a good job after this project. Ideally I would land a job in a company I like making games that I could want to play (if I wasn’t making them). That’s the two things I look for. The rest is irrelevant (well to a point, I’m not going to work for free). If that fails, I’ll lower my standard to games that their target audience would actually enjoy (even though I’m not a part of it). If that fails, I’ll look for a job within my skill set that would still count as year of experience on my CV. And if that even fails, I guess I’ll go raise goats in a mountain somewhere. But I don’t really like goats. Maybe chickens would be better. It’s a good meat and there’s eggs too.

• Switched from one prefab for one ship type to a single ship object. I did this because I didn’t want to create a lot of prefabs. That way the types configuration is in the GameData, and changing it or adding a type is really easy. Also this enabled me to have less centralized data in the Player script. Since I only need to know what type is selected, I can have ship data anywhere I want. This means for example that the damage influencer is only on the weapon. This allowed me to have more influencers easily. The main downside for now is that it broke the upgrades and the special powers. The upgrades are broken because they were done badly, it’s just int variables saved in PlayerPrefs, and it was meant to change in the near future anyway. As for the special powers. Well, they were tight to the ship type prefab and weren’t considered like the weapons or the bombs. So I’ll need to change that.

• Did the ship data of 15 different types. And thanks to the modifications I made to the way the ship works it was super quick to do. But it was still really boring. Just modifying floats and adding entries in lists. I didn’t even tested the types. I know that every influencer work, but I have no idea if each type is pleasant to play. In the end I’d like to think that I did all the ship types in one day while I had planned three. But since I didn’t planned anytime to make the special powers of each type, I guess it’s going to be close to the original estimation.