Day 84: Today I thought I would finish the tutorial. I didn’t even start it… BUT that doesn’t mean I didn’t do anything today. It’s just that there were unplanned stuff. Oh this morning a friend of mine posted a stuff telling people to not die. So I learned about the crude death rate and used it to calculate the approximate number of people that died since the time he posted that tweet. That’s 6837 death per hour FYI. I have weird hobbies (and I might be a terrible friend).

Daily interesting stuff:

• Really long article on gamasutra. It’s about game school and why they’re not that great to find a job. It also contains some advices. But I thought it was a bit too condescending.

• Reddit post “value of gamedev as an occupation”. Well actually it should’ve been called does games contribute to society. I didn’t read much of it because I didn’t have any popcorn. It went crazy there. My take is that games provide entertainment therefore are awesome as well as the people making them. As simple as that.

• Reddit post, guy asking for feedback on his portfolio. It’s interesting because it’s an example of a portfolio and comments about it. Usually you either find portfolios or generic advices on how to make them.

• Reddit post “does C++ with unreal counts as experience”. Majority is “yes but watch out for the STL”. It’s also full of advices on what a C++ dev should know.

Tasks done:

• Implemented an introduction. It took a lot of time. But it’s not that great. It’s just some text on a black screen. The text has a letter by letter anim though. And there’s fadeout between sentences. I tried to keep it as short as possible. It’s just a placeholder to talk a bit about the story. One thing that was super annoying is the problem I had with responsive text and animations. See, in Unity to have adaptive text, you just have to check a “best fit” bool and the text will be as big as possible within its box. And it works great, really. But the catch is that is when you change the text letter by letter like I do, the size change as the string length do… And I didn’t find how to do a custom best fit. There was no information what so ever on how it’s calculated. Oh there’s an access to the calculated value. So I thought I just had to get it at start then set manually the font size to that, then disable the best fit. WRONG. Because the calculated value is only available two frames after start. So if I want to get the size I need to leave the text for two frames and so it looks like it’s flashing… In the end I did an ugly component that takes a default font size and scale it based on the width of the screen. So I give it it the font size found by testing values in the editor in 1080p and it adapts it at start for any resolution. I just hope I won’t have to handle a resolution change while I’m in the middle of the introduction…

• Put the FileSaveLoad class to its own file. I don’t know why I put it on the SaveData file until now. Seriously this makes no sense and I spent time searching for it three time already! So I changed it. It took like one minute.
  Saved the current scene index. In the main menu, the play button would always launch the game scene. That’s not what I want. I want that the first time it launches the introduction for example. So I did a simple script that saves the current scene in the save file at start. If I don’t want to save the scene (like for the main menu) I just don’t attach the script to any object.

• Implemented the new save creation. Now if there’s no save at the start of the game, it will create one with the appropriate initial values. This is important, because until now, I was using my debug tool to create and modify the save. Now it’ll also work for the player.