Day 92: Today was really unproductive. At least in terms of tasks done for this sprint. I read a stuff online, that lead to other stuff that lead to other stuff, that made me wonder if this project is not just a big mistake. Yes that escalated quickly. So I spent a good part of the day getting information on my general career path. I’m pretty vague now because the details will take most of today’s log.

Daily interesting stuff:

• GDC youtube video on how to make an indie game in 12 month. It’s a short talk (around 30min) I wanted to watched it at lunch but I completely forgot. I’ll try again tomorrow.

• Article on Planet Coaster crowd simulation. I’ll be honest I didn’t understand everything. But it was really great.

• Reddit post asking for a source of game references. One person posted a link to a youtube channel. This channel has a ton of video of different gameplay part of a bunch of games. This is gold. If you want to watch how 30 different games did main menus it’s perfect.

• Reddit post “making the game you want vs making it for others”. It’s incredible how so many people can say the same thing using different words. Most answers were basically the same.

“Tasks” done:

• I saw a post on legal aspect again. That made me curious about the rules that would apply to me in France. So I tried to check that. It was really upsetting. Everything seems so complicated. Even the simplest status had like 10 different options. The hope to simply release the game as an individual simply vanished. That made me question whenever it was actually worth it to release it (I’m mostly talking about steam and other “strict” stores). I honestly don’t expect much sales. After all, I’m alone and unexperienced and suck at PR. But that’s ok. From the beginning I didn’t expected any money from this project. But it made me wonder whenever that would count as relevant experience for my future job hunt. From what I’ve seen on the net, it might not. And that was the point where I started to think that doing this project might be a big mistake. Maybe I should’ve just tried to find any game job and thus build momentum. Maybe I’m just wasting my time learning stuff that won’t even matter later. Maybe stopping it right now would actually be a good decision. But I decided to keep going. I’ll finish this project because I’m not a quitter. I didn’t give up before, and I don’t want to start now (wow this sounds cheesy). Having this log really helped me there, because it forced me to calmly think about this situation and put enough order in my thoughts to write it down. Whatever happens, I’ll make sure I at least publish a game on itch.io. It might be ugly. It might be simple. It might be boring. It might not have any decent PR. But at least I’ll do it and I’ll have the satisfaction of having finished something. And if that doesn’t help me to find a job, well… I’ll find something else.

• After all that, working on my project was hard. I couldn’t focus at all. My mind was busy going everywhere about this and imagining every outcome. But I managed to do a brainstorm about the unlock ship achievements and find one for every layout (achievements unlock ships layouts). I tried to keep them simple so that I don’t have to put events everywhere. But I really want them to be challenging and not about grinding at all. This should be feats that proves that you master your ship type.

• Read a quick recap on C++ syntax. I read it there. It’s a great site and has pages for a lot of languages. The thing is that it’s aimed for developers that already know other languages. So It just shows the syntax and the specificity of that language. This doesn’t have anything to do with Rogue Cadet, but I wanted to write it here anyway. And since I’m writing, I get to make the decisions about the content. If you’re not happy go make your own log (with blackjack and hookers).

• Thought about the achievement and how I’ll implement them. I did a quick UI mockup directly in the ship selection menu. Then I’ll add option to display them in the pause menu of the main game. And I think I’ll make a component for every achievement. That way they can be attached to each ship and there won’t be any irrelevant achievement listening while the wrong ship type is playing.