Day 76: Today all my code just fell apart like house of cards. Every Time I started doing a simple task it just turned into a giant mess. This was really depressing. Maybe its because the part I’m working on has a lot of implications. Or maybe it’s just that my code is badly designed. Anyway, I had to cut a lot of things I wanted done for this sprint.

Daily interesting stuff: Not much today, I mostly looked at jobs.

• advice on negotiating salary

• Youtube video about Simpson’ paradox (french). It’s a about a strange thing that happens in statistics where when you have a confusing factor, it can change completely the interpretation of the results depending on how you look at them.

Tasks done:

• Started working on the upgrades and the shop to sell them. I quickly quit. There was just too much stuff to figure out. I have no idea how I’ll code this, but I sure knew I had not enough time to do it today. This is probably the core of what I’m working on for a while, and see it collapse like that… It was really depressing. But on the plus side I learned a lot about buying and raising chickens and how to become an hermit. You know just in case.

• Showed the remaining stock of each ship in the UI. I thought it would be easy. I was wrong. There was save data access problems and other things linked to my architecture not working well enough. I still managed to do it though. But only by using a trick and loading the data from the file directly instead of accessing it by the Singleton.

• Fixed a bug where the life bar UI didn’t have the right data. This was actually easy. Instead of using Unity service locator, I just listened to the player creation event.

• Created a custom animation system. I know it sounds a complete overkill. But I have around 15 ship types, and I don’t want to create specific animations for each one. So I did a simple component that takes an array of sprites and flip through it at a given speed. Then for the player I did a custom animator that changed the current Flip animation based on the parameters I had with the Unity Animation system (speed). That way changing the animations/sprite of the different ship types is easier.

Sprint end: This concludes the “Ship sprint”. Well “conclude” is a big word. Let’s just say, that I’ll work on something else after. I should’ve got a complete ships/upgrade system by now. But I don’t. I have merely a skeleton of what I want. The next sprint will be shorter and focus on the Upgrades.

What went wrong:

• I completely overscoped the sprint. Having the different ships types with their powers, weapons, bombs, and stats. Plus having the upgrades, the stock feature, the weight feature and a functional UI to show it etc… That was just TOO MUCH. And I’m not even talking of the underlying architecture needed to handle this much interconnected data.

• I had a really slow start. In terms of productivity, the first week was awful. I wasn’t able to focus. Nothing got done… A nightmare.

What went right:

• When I was really down and couldn’t work, I took a day off. It worked really well. It didn’t magically give me my motivation back. But it helped me enough to overcome this.

• I dealt with motivation loss, and kept going even if I really wanted to quit many times (wow this sounds really pathetic that I have to write that).