Day 70: Today I worked. Oh this what I do everyday? Sorry I forgot you knew that. I want to say that yesterday I forgot to mention that I finished watching a GDC video yesterday. Forgetting to share that with you gave me the idea to add a section to the logs. The daily interesting stuff section. I start everyday by going through twitter and reddit gamedev to be up to date. during lunch break I watch vulgarization videos. So there a lot of stuff to share. Here we go:

Daily interesting stuff:

• How to Survive in Gamedev for Eleven Years Without a Hit. Really interesting stuff. He has a lot of data that he uses to do some analyses

• http://www.gamedevtreasure.com/. A website regrouping great indie dev articles.

• Rami Ismail’s post on twitter follow friday. A list of people to follow and why. But more detailed.

• SteakSteak. An indie game publisher. I liked their humor. Too much people take themselves too seriously. I’ll send them an email when I reach alpha.

Tasks done:

• Implemented 8 powers. I ditched one because it was too hard to make and wasn’t really interesting. Since that’s all I did today, I’ll give you more details.

  • Remove Hitbox: It wasn’t really easy to make. The base is simple. I just disable the collider for a fixed time. This is meant to allow the player to phase through walls. The problem was: what happen when the power stops while the player is in the walls? I tried many things. First I thought of getting the room where the player is, deducing its position and put the player inside this room again. But that poses a lot of problems. Mainly because I have no (easy) way of knowing where inside a room is walkable. So then I though I just had to invert the player velocity to make him go backward. But it wouldn’t work if you’re not moving when the power stops. Then I tried to move him based on a vector of its position to the previous room pos. But it wasn’t working. In the end the solution was super simple. I just had to save the position of the player when he activate the power (I know that’s a safe spot). Then when the power end, I make a director vector to that safe spot. And I just have to move the player toward this until there is no wall collision anymore.

  • Vampire: This was easier. But I had to learn some Unity stuff I didn’t know. Once I knew how to find physics objects inside a circle. All I had to do is use a layer mask to only catch enemies and then calling their Hit function. Of course, then I implemented some graphical feedback. A simple particle system going from a circle emitter to the player. Particles are small red circles. It looks ok.

  • Fart. Yes you read that well. It’s not clever at all. You press a button and a fart noise is played. I still had to find some decent fart noise with a no attribution licence (because I’m too lazy to do attribution just for three fart noise). This power is actually there because some ships have passive powers (like showing treasure rooms). And I wanted something stupid to occupy the power button.

  • Sword circle: spawn swords that circles around the player. The swords take and give damage. They’re essentially like a player. They’re even on the same layer. But it took some time to know what to use. Because they are close to many existing things. Bullets, enemies, player etc… In the end I just wrote a custom script and put them the player physic layer to ensures collisions were ok. I also had to make a sprite. I used one found on the net as a model.

  • Flames: Big flames that damages enemies. I modified the flames particles of the Unity standard assets. Funny thing, this powers actually uses the same script as the vampire. The difference is that the damage to heal ratio is at 0 and the DPS is much more higher.

  • Random power: change the power each time it’s used. This is a hacky power. I put it at 0 mana cost and 0 cooldown. At start, it instantiate a power. Then at activation, it waits for the other power cooldown to end, then it replaces it with another power. Without forgetting to apply the actual mana to the new power and notifying the UI.

  • Regen mana. This is another useless power. It regenerates mana, so you can… regenerate more mana… BUT with the random power it becomes useful as it replenish your mana then disappears for a (hopefully) useful power. But this is a side effect. It’s mostly used for when you have an active power.

  • Show time. It shows the current time on screen. Yes it’s also useless. But it was easy to make (kinda).