Day 88: Today I decided that I’ll take friday off. This means that it’s the last entry for this year. So I’ll write a small section in today’s log to reflect on this year. Today I couldn’t stand having no coke so I did a quick trip to the grocery store. I bought two pack of four 2L bottles. So that’s 16 liters of coke. I hope it’ll last for a while.

Daily interesting facts:

• Article on Rogue Legacy’s tutorial. It was really instructive. They put so much thought into details I didn’t even notice! There was some stuff that I thought was “natural” but actually had a very precise reason to be there.

• Reddit post on a guy wanting to go indie with his friend. He seemed pretty far from the “I’m gonna make games and be rich in no time” type. But he didn’t seemed to know much about the realities of gamedev since he didn’t made any game. Well at least he didn’t mention any in his post. And that’s what everyone advised to do: make games. It’s the only way to learn how to make games.

• Reddit post, “what makes a game repetitive”. If it’s easy and not rewarding it’s repetitive.

Tasks done:

• Planned the sprint. It’s the “Dungeon variety” sprint and it’ll last until the 6th of January. At first I thought it would start on Monday the 2th but since I finished the previous sprint early, I thought I should extend the time window of this one.

• Reduced the size of the dungeon. Instead of 2020 it’s now 1515, the first zone is bigger than the other. I thought it would be a complicated task to do, because in my memory the size variable of the dungeon didn’t really work. But it did. All I had to do is to also change the size of the zones which are independent of the total size. And also make the borders smaller. Piece of cake.

• Started the design of the special rooms. I didn’t found much stuff. It’s really hard to not fall into a copy of rogue legacy. I’ll ask my roommate to do a brainstorm tomorrow

• Implemented the treasure room feature. Now each room has a type variable that is an enum. When the room is saved into the dungeon (with my custom tool) it automatically puts it the right list based on that. The mini map then when it instantiate its room UI checks to see if it’s a treasure room. If so it adds a treasure icon as a child. What’s cool about this is that it can also be used for the special rooms. And even though right now it’s not used, the dungeon generator can take advantage of having different lists to control the probabilities.

• Implemented the “reveal treasure” passive power. I used events for communication. The power waits for the game to be loaded then dispatch the reveal event. The mini map listens to it and then iterates over the rooms to activate the ones that are treasure. I couldn’t actually fully test it since I didn’t do any content. So there’s no treasure room configs. But I tested each part separately. And I know the activation function is called. And the function is really simple. So there shouldn’t be any problem.

Year end: This concludes this year. It’s been a year full of events. I worked like crazy on my school project, then I got my diploma. Then I took some vacations. I moved out of Paris. I went full time indie. I went to Indie Cade. I made 395 github commits. And I wrote 88 pages of devlog. I hope to do even more stuff in 2017. I hope I’ll find a good job and that Rogue Cadet turns out to be great. If anyone reads this, I’d like to thank you and wish you all the best. Wow that was cheesy. But yeah if you read my devlog it means you support me and that’s awesome and you’re awesome.