Day 87: Today was way less productive. Just like when I came back from IndieCade, I have a huge productivity drop right after getting home and start working again. I can finish my short term goal that were in my mind before leaving, but I have trouble getting by once they’re over. If this drop continues I might take friday off because it really helped last time.

Daily interesting stuff: Not that much today, sorry…

• List of Indie publishers. There’s a bunch of them there. It can be useful.

• Steam spy creator’s article. Interesting insights about various aspects of steam.

Tasks done:

• Implemented the health and mana potions. I tried multiples things before saying fuck it and choose the simplest solution. I wanted to have as less coupling as possible. So I used the collision events that are already present. For the health potion, it uses the Damage Dealer component. That means that the Player automatically detects it when there’s a collision. At first I thought I just had to put a negative value and everything would be fine. But it also triggered the hit feedback. So I had to put a condition to check the value of the damage. For the mana potion, I create a mana component, that is much like the damage dealer. But instead on only containing a float value, it also has a Collision function. Then it uses the GetComponentInChildren (since it collides with the player) to find a BaseSpecialPower. If it has one it calls the Regenerate method.

• Thought about of the quick travel feature. The idea was to find a way to fast forward rooms you would already have visited. But all the things I found required a lot of teaching and graphic feedback. So I decided to cut it at least for now. The dungeon should be smaller anyway so the problem might not be so important.

• Started working on how to mark the mini map with the treasure rooms. The ideas is that when there’s a treasure in the room, it’s shown in the room. If you have the appropriate special power, you can see all the treasure of the map without having to go in the room first. The best way I found to that was to modify the dungeon generation script to have a list of treasure rooms alongside the list of dead end and normal rooms I have. Then I thought that the same process could be applied for special event rooms, and I was happy about it. Then I realized I was actually doing work for the next sprint. So I decided to note all the idea I had on how to do it, and working on it tomorrow. It’s a big chunk to do and I’d rather do it in its appropriate sprint.

• Read a bit more of the marketing book I bought. It really reads well. Not like many technical books that are really dense.

Sprint end: This concludes the “Collectibles sprint”. Now I have working treasure chests, barrels, and potions. I still didn’t put them in the rooms, but I hope it’ll get the game less repetitive.

What went wrong:

• Motivation loss today.

• I think I’m missing something. It doesn’t feels like I’ve done enough.

What went right:

• I finished it in two days instead of the whole week. I’m not sure it’s due to me being efficient more than me getting wrong time estimations. But still, I finished it early.

• I put the collectibles twice on my rough planning so now I have more wiggle room to meet my deadline. (is that really a good thing that I made an error?)