Day 80: Today was weird. I did all what I wanted. But I finished it really early. So I didn’t know what to do. I should’ve started the next sprint. But instead I procrastinated. I annoyed my roommate, started at the window and took time to feed my anxiety. One question that surfaced was: Will it be enough? This summarize well my fears. I don’t know if the final game will be good enough to get a publisher, and artist but more importantly is going to be enough to find a job? To exorcise a bit, a wrote the question in a txt file and copy-pasted it until all the screen was covered by it.

Daily interesting stuff:

• Cost of making a VR game. Guy talks about the budget for his game (contains some tips).

• Interview with a maker of Godot. Godot is a great open source game engine. I used it a bit and did some doc. So I follow what’s happening. Every time I baffled with how much they can accomplish with so few people. For example there’s a visual scripting feature that just seemed to pop from nowhere.

• Postmortem of someone who made a game. It wasn’t an exceptional read. But it was short enough.

• Productivity hacks. That was basic but still interesting.

Tasks done:

• Made the weapon upgrade. It seemed easy at first. I just need to change the selected weapon int in the save. But where it becomes complicated is when you try to buy an other weapon. If you exceed the maximum amount of weapon you can have, I need to unequip the first weapon. The trick is that I also need to unequip the upgrade that select that weapon. And there’s nothing to tell me which weapon correspond to which upgrade. So I had to implement a search in the upgrades. It check only the weapon category, and check if the associated weapon index correspond to the saved one. I also had to save the maximum number of weapons to be able to check it.

• Worked on the other upgrades. I realized I could do them all with the scripts I had. I thought the dual weapon upgrade would require a custom script. But with the maximum weapon number in the save data and the fact that I use reflection with the stats upgrade, I don’t need to. That’s cool. The unlock bomb upgrade can simply be an upgrade unlock upgrade. Same with the weapon types unlocking. That was cool to realize that I create something modular enough to fit many cases.

• Tested the upgrade feature more thoughtfully. I mostly fixed the ship selection detail pane. First it showed the “percent” variables which are actually ratios, so I had to multiply it by 100. Then I didn’t thought about locked layouts. The are correctly showed everywhere but in the detail pane. So I add a condition to check for it. Now when it’s locked, it shows only “???” instead of precious information. Then I should’ve worked on doing the actual upgrades. But that’s content, and I don’t really want to make some now…

• Started reading Game to Market. The marketing ebook I bought a few days ago. I heard it through a post of its creator on reddit. I liked the description of it. But most importantly I liked the pay what you want price. So far the book is really interesting. I don’t know if I have what to take to put the advices into practice. But even for the knowledge itself it’s worth it.