Day 72: Today it’s Monday, yay… This weekend was nice. I went grocery shopping and was finally able to make some decent food. Instead of “Wtf could I do with what’s left”. I also “finished” skyrim. After 140 hours of play. I got almost all achievements. But most importantly during my playthrough I collected 876 cheese wheels. That’s right, every time I came across some cheese I bought it or I stole it. And then I ate them all. Is it weird that I’m actually proud of that?

Daily interesting stuff:

• Reddit post. Advice on getting a programming job. There’s a ton of posts like this one. But it has so many comments. So I’m posting it.

• Reasons to not start in Indie company. It’s actually not really saying that Indie market is horrible. It’s just an advice to wait until you actually have something to sell before diving into paperwork.

• Reddit post. What makes a great studio? Not a few responses unfortunately. The one there is good though.

• Reddit post. Guy worrying that not knowing Unity is bad for getting an indie job. Responses goes to the standard “be adaptable” to well pretty much anything. The digression is what’s interesting here.

Tasks done:

• Fixed some minor bugs in the ship selection menu. First I added some placeholder ship variables to test the thing. Then I realized that the special power description wasn’t dynamic. So I cracked the detailsPane code and realized I was modifying the wrong variable. I was setting the power title twice. It was easy fixes. And it was great to start the day.

• Planned the week. Since I only have the week left to finish this sprint, and that there’s still a lot to do. I made a quick planning to see if I can meet the deadline. Wednesday and Thursday are a bit too packed. But I should be able to manage.

• Started working on the ship upgrade menu. First I did wire frames. I’m not really good at anything graphical. So doing this is hard for me. I have no idea how to make it look good, and it’s frustrating. So as with everything else in this project I tried to keep it the simplest I could. There’s the categories icons (Upgrades, research, ships, weapons). Selecting one pops a panel and a detail pane. It’s crazy how much time UI takes me. 5min tasks turns into hours all the time! I don’t know why. Maybe it’s just because I find it boring to make this stuff when I’m not sure where I’m going. Unlike with the ship selection, I’m using Unity animation system. I thought it would be faster given that there’s cool tools. Well as it turns out I was wrong. At the end of the day I’m stuck on grid layout. In the “shop pane” where you can buy stuff, I need to arrange it into a grid. But I don’t know how many items I’ll have. It’s easy you would say, just use the Unity UI grid component. Yeah except it works in pixels. So bye bye responsiveness. I tried that, but making a design that fit 720p to 1440p was beyond my capabilities. So I started my own layout with blackjack and hookers percentage instead of pixels. I use a max column count, that shifts if there’s not enough items to make a row. Then I center the whole thing vertically. Well I try to center it. For now I didn’t managed to do it. It must be a simple mistake in my calculations. But it was late so I left that as is.