Day 71: Today I got what I wanted done. Even though I spent a lot of time on a non-necessary feature. Except from that, tomorrow, the cats I’m keeping are gone and next friday I got another one coming. It’s great it makes me a bit of money with no real effort.

Daily interesting stuff:

• Shovel Knight prequel first trailer. It looks awesome! I think I might buy it. Shovel Knight was awesome even if I sucked at it.

• Someone on reddit posted a big list of game related youtubers (1437 to be precise).

• Someone from an uncommon background posted on reddit asking about gamedev career path. Not really relevant for me, but the comments were interesting.

• A post on reddit where everyone gives their top ten gamedev related articles.
  Famous “Never Give Up” youtube video. It’s funny too watch, and it actually works.

• Two videos about cognitive bias (french). Here and here. That’s super interesting stuff. It has nothing to do with gamedev but it’s a great way to spend lunch break.

Tasks Done:

• Followed a bunch of people on twitter. Yes it still sounds like I’m some sort of pervert. I actually did this based on a post on reddit suggesting that following people and participating was the base of twitter (no shit). So I thought of using follow friday (which I always confuse with feedback friday) to follow new people. I used this article which has a lot of gamedev people to follow. Then I used the twitter recommendations. Then I looked at who the people I know follow. I added like 60 persons.

• Gave two feedback on feedback friday. I didn’t even post my game. It really just to give feedback.

• Implemented a file save feature. This actually made me think about the whole global access problems. I spent a lot of time trying to find the best way to do this. I was bothering to not find any answer. It’s like there’s no good solution. Only less worse ones. Finally I opted for a singleton. Now wait I know what you think “A singleton what an horror!”. But I use it only to provide readonly access to data needed in a lot of places. That way I don’t have to worry about side effects. I think it’s better than the dependency injection I used before. I can enforce readonly, I can aggregate data in this class, and I can switch the ScriptableObject really easily to test other configurations. The main problem is with the actual save. It’s a place where I actually want to modify those variables. So I made the save method static and it takes the data class in parameter. The load method is also static and returns the loaded data class. That way if I want to modify the save, I load it first modify the object and send it back to save. This should prevent the temptation of modifying variables through the singleton to save them way after. But I must be careful of not having too different part saving around the same time because they might override each other.

• Implemented the base upgrade influence. It was actually really easy. Since I got everything I needed with the save file. And since I already influence some variables for the ships types. I still had a bit trouble with the bombs. I just forgot to test it thoroughly so it had some bugs.