Day 82: Today was the first day of the “Menu sprint”. I’ll do the main menu, the pause menu, and if I have time, I’ll squeeze the tutorial in. When I started working (late) this morning, I didn’t expected this day to be productive. But it was.

Daily interesting stuff:

• Really long article on contractors in the game dev industry. It was interesting but I stop reading in the middle.

• Former classmate posted a screenshot of the game he works on. It looks gorgeous..

• Reddit post “Is it normal to hate your project?”. After a while of playing the same thing over and over again it only natural to be fed up with your own game.

• GDC talk. Advice on how to do a great portfolio. I haven’t watched it yet. It’s from an artist point of view so I’m not sure a lot of it will be relevant for me. I’ll know more when I’ll watch it.

Tasks done:

• Planned the sprint. It will be a short one. I have the week to finish it. Well not all week since on friday I catch my carpooling at 17:00. I’m going to my grandparent’s place for Christmas.

• “Finished” the main menu. I didn’t thought I would be able to get it done today. It was the biggest task of this sprint. It felt great to have it too. It “legitimize” the game big time. It made it look like an actual game instead of a demo. Even if it’s kind of fake it works. I did a simple centered UI over a room that took at random in the prefabs. Then I hacked a bit to have enemies firing inside the room without all the game logic. I’m not sure it’s the best solution, but I like to watch the mesmerizing bullet patterns patterns. I had huge trouble making the UI animations. Because it turns out that having both movement and selection animation on buttons fucks everything up. There was weird warning messages, inspector bugs and stuff like that. In the end I had to hack it with a custom script that sets a boolean in the Animator to enable the selection behavior only after the opening animation is over. It was really annoying. Seriously, this should be simple, and it was mind boggling. But I managed to get it work and that’s all that matters.

• Kinda started working on the tutorial. Because the play button of the main menu should either launch the tutorial or the ship selection menu, I thought I should implement that. Then I had to think of the first save creation and stuff like that. At the end I didn’t achieve anything but I started some things. So it was worth noting it. Oh and for the play button I just load the main scene for now.