Day 75: Today It was harder to work. I did still did stuff though. But I felt like I should have done more stuff. I started well, but as the day went by, my efficiency steadily dropped. Until it stopped completely when I realized I would have to change back the ships. I didn’t account for sprite and animations changes for the different types. So know I have to go back and create a prefab for each ship type. That just killed the tiny amount of motivation I had left. I hope that I’ll be able to finish everything tomorrow…

Daily interesting stuff:

• Article about giving too much control to artists. I didn’t read it all, but it seemed interesting.

• Reddit post. Person sick of seeing so much games using “8-bit” as a selling point.

• Article on the best pixel artists out there. And wow these artwork are just gorgeous.

• Advice on how to get a job in the game industry. What’s interesting this time is that those question are asked to a panel of 15 pros.

Tasks done:

• Implemented the ship stock feature. Again this made me think about architecture. But When thinking about it, I conclude that the choices I made aren’t so bad. So I didn’t changed anything. To have a stock feature, I added a “maxstock” and a stock replendish rate on each ship config. Then I added the current stock of ships in the save. In the intergame, the ship selector is in charge of updating the ship stock save data when you select a ship. And now that I write this, I realize that I forgot to show the stock in the UI. And also that I didn’t grey out ships not in stock. Yay more things to do tomorrow.

• Implemented tools to modify the save in the Unity editor. This way I can cheat easily. It wasn’t actually hard to implement this. I used a scriptable object which automatically serialize its variables. So by having a SaveData variable, I get an Inspector interface at no cost. Now all I had to is to create a tool that load data in this variable and one that override the actual save with the variable. So now all I have to do is to click on the object and use the key bindings for the tool (F9 to load, F10 to save).

• Kinda implemented the weight system. I say kinda because I’m missing a key component. The upgrades themselves don’t exist yet. And since it’s them that add weight to the ship, you can see the problem. I still did all the other parts though. It looks a lot like the ship stock feature. Except there’s only one current weight and not one per ship. Technically I don’t even need to save the ship current weight as it can be guessed from summing the weight of all the equipped upgrades. But I thought it would be too cumbersome, to do that each time.

• Dropped the idea of having a tool to know which bullet pattern is used where. I thought this tool would useful because the patterns are Scriptable objects and thus can be used on multiple bullet fountains. But in the end I decided that each pattern would have its specific target. So no need for the tool. As for why I still use Scriptable objects instead of config directly in the bullet fountains. It’s just that these objects are passed by reference. So no matter how many enemies, there would only be one pattern in memory. I guess it’s kind of a flywheight pattern.