Day 85: Today is the last day before Christmas “hollidays”. Tomorrow will be used for making chocolates gifts and cleaning the apartment. Sigh, it could be used to develop some meaningful features. But I guess I can’t do anything about it. At least it’ll be over soon.

Daily interesting stuff:

• Reddit post on Unity new price model. Well “new” it’s been announced for quite while already. But now that we’re getting close to the perpetual 5x licenses, people start asking questions.

• Reddit post, how to deal with multiple ideas. Comments wanders from snappy responses to how to participates in a game jam.

• Article on an indie team that didn’t want to die. I didn’t read the article but it seemed interesting.

Tasks done:

• Implemented the tutorial. That’s all I did today. But I’m still proud of it. I’m proud because it didn’t require any custom script. All that I used was existing stuff. This is weird for me since tutorial have always been a pain in ass. You need to know so much information, listen to everything the player does, check if he does it right, handle all the cases. And often right in the core game. But this time it was much smoother. I built a separate scene that is used only for the tutorial. Then I just had to add controlled elements to show the core gameplay. Of course I needed to modify the elements so that they fit the tutorial. For example, I needed rooms. But I didn’t want to have a random generation, so I didn’t added the dungeon generator. I also didn’t want that the room chose an enemy pack at random, so I removed the room component of the rooms I manually placed. Then for the enemies. I didn’t want the first one to fire, so I removed their weapon. And I did this with pretty much all the tutorial. And it works great. I didn’t even need an animation to show the “tips”/”orders” I just used world space canvas in each room. That way all the text is static and appear to be written on the floor of the rooms. It makes it super simple for me, and the effect is great. I still needed to code some stuff though. But not new stuff, just improvement of old systems. I modified the DeathScreen so that it could work without the score. It was still using the really old “singleton” based UI. pffff. I also created a component for switching gameObjects based on if a gamepad is connected or not. It’s useful to display the appropriate controls for the users. I had this behaviour before, but it was hard coded in the InputUI since it was the only one to use it. So I moved it to its own component. Finally I had to do minor fixes, because the tutorial is a really tear down game version, some stuff was having problems it didn’t have in the game. Stuff like listening to events too late because in the game those event were dispatched later.

Sprint end: This concludes the “Menu sprint” even if it was not all about menus, I didn’t find a better name. Now I have nice menus that makes the game look more polished. I have the full loop complete too. I can launch the game on the main menu and access everything like it’s supposed to.

What went wrong:

• Motivation was low. Christmas really depresses me. There’s too much social pressure around those times.

• I had trouble starting in time. It’s most certainly related to the first point. But I should be quicker on checking twitter news. What was funny is that my drops of motivation consistent, first in the morning, then just after lunch and finally around 4pm.

What went right:

• I still did a lot of stuff, in less time than I thought.

• I’m happy with the result of this sprint. Making visual stuff sure is a boost. After so much time doing “invisible” stuff it feels good to see some progress. I think that without that I wouldn’t have cope with the holiday period.