Day 86: Today is the first after Christmas “vacation”. I came back yesterday around noon, but I didn’t manage to work. It was a tiring weekend… The food was really good though. But my stomach really can’t handle this much. It ended with belly pain and a lot of time on the toilet… But it’s over and I’m back to the comfort of my home. Only one month left for the alpha milestone.

Daily interesting facts:

• Reddit post about law questions. It’s actually an old post but I found a reference to it in another post. There’s good advices here.

• Reddit post about jumping from unrelated tasks often. It’s interesting to see other people’s work habits.

• Article saying that Owlboy’s devs aren’t much against piracy. It’s actually a summary of a part of an AMA.

Tasks done:

• Planned the sprint. It’s the “Collectibles sprint”. It should last until the end of the week. But I pretty much did 80% of it today… So I might add more stuff or jump to another sprint.

• Solved a tiny bug in the collectibles. To make the pickup sound, I still used a singleton access instead of events. So I fixed that. Now It works with events. As a result if there’s no SoundManager in scene, it doesn’t generate any error.

• Thought about the collectibles. In the design doc I wrote that it there was multiple types, like ships blueprints and such. But it doesn’t seems good. It conflicts with the fact that you can buy the exact same thing in the shop. So I tried to find interesting collectibles, but I couldn’t find any. So I’m just going to implement money chests. I’ll also do mana and health potions.

• Made a build of the game to test if it was fun. Played it. Had some fun. Couldn’t help myself and fixed some trivial bugs I found. It was stuff like debug logs, and save initialization. I’m still not sure I can make the game non repetitive. That’s one of the few big problems left to solve.

• Implemented Treasure chest. At first I wanted to simply use the collectible script I already have. But it wasn’t made to handle a bunch of coins at the same time. Then I wanted to do a better collectible system. One where you would have a “fountain” with a gold value and that would spawn the appropriate amount of coins based on that and the current value of a coin. That way every coin in the game would have the same value. Instead of manually making the coins bigger like I have now. But the problem is that it impact all the enemies. And the enemies are in the rooms. But there’s no nested prefabs. So If I change an enemy I have to modify all the ones in the rooms. I wrote a tool for that, but it takes forever to run… So I decided to wait until I have a better system to do a better money chest system… I implemented a simple solution in the meantime. I just have a bunch of disabled gameobjects and I activate one at random when the chest is opened (by killing it, but it has 1hp). The gameobjects are full of coins. And voila, it’s dead simple, but it works.

• Made a destructible barrel. It’s the same thing as the chest. Except it’s a barrel, and that I hacked it so that the death explosion is smaller. I wanted to have more variety, but I didn’t found any assets besides the barrel. So It will be all for now.

• Started to work on the health and mana potions. I made the graphics myself! And it doesn’t look like shit. Even if it’s nowhere near the quality of the model I used. But at least it looks like health and mana potions. I tried to hack the collectible script to make the health potion, and it works really well. Except for one thing, it triggers the player hit feedback and thus raise the shield. I don’t want that, so I’ll have to find a graceful way to influence the player. But I’ll do it tomorrow.