Day 89: Today’s the first work day of the year. NYE was nice. I spent it being comfy at home and had a great meal. Today I didn’t have motivation problems. But I did have trouble to focus. I still did some stuff. But I think I might’ve been able to do more.

Daily interesting stuff:

• One game a month. It’s a challenge where you have to do a game each month for a year. I’m tempting to try it after Rogue Cadet. I’m already planning to do game a week during summer, so I’m not sure yet.

• Reddit post about new year resolutions. There was a lot of “finish my game”.

• Reddit post about not going to reddit (too often). It said that going to reddit might depress you because there’s a lot of people doing awesome things. But I don’t think it’s really that true. But I probably spend too much time on reddit though.

Tasks done:

• Did some management tasks. I checked the planning until the alpha deadline. I’ll try to finish the current sprint by Wednesday and work on achievements Tuesday and Friday. That would leave me two weeks to make content. Which I’ve been putting off for far too long. I checked the alpha features documents. I had to cut some stuff like the challenges system. And I also moved some features to the beta milestone. Stuff like optimization and Input rebinding. Thinking about it it’s not really meant to be in alpha.

• Read a part of the marketing book I bought. There was great insights. For example there was a summary of the traditional 4 P marketing mix. While reading this book I often pause and look at how I it applies to my game. What are my key selling points? What price do I think is fair? And other questions like that.

• Implemented teleporters. When you enter it’s collider zone, it wait for an Input then move you instantly to another location of the scene. It’s an essential component of the boss rooms system. The actual technical part was super easy. I did it in around 15 minutes. It’s just a collision check, an Input check then a position setting. What was really long was all the feedback around it. When you’re in range, it shows an image of the button you need to press. When you activate it, there’s particles and then a black screen transition. Oh and also I had to do the teleporter sprite.

• Started working on the boss rooms. I actually did this while working on the teleporter. I have almost all the necessary elements. I have a way to teleport the player back. I have an old “Boss” script that checks for its death. I modified the dungeon generation for the bosses rooms so that it doesn’t checks for the old playerprefs. But there’s still a lot of things to do. The feature is made of so many small bricks that it’s hard to wrap my head around it. I keep thinking in all directions and asking myself ton of questions. How do you teleport back? What’s the reward? How do you save the progress? How do you prevent the player to teleport in the boss room again? I had trouble to see the whole flow of it. But I should finish it tomorrow morning.