Day 94: Today it’s Monday. It’s really a hard day. Waking up, having to work, bla bla bla that kind of rant. I still feel like it was a productive day. I finished all I wanted really early. That gave me some time to do other stuff I put aside most of time.

Daily interesting stuff:

• Reddit post “is C++ still relevant?”. Answer: Yes, yes it is.

• Article about redefining what it means to be indie. This had some good points. And it reads well.

• Rami Ismail curious cat page. It’s full of good advice. I only had two links for today, so I looked into my personal reserve of bookmarks for you. Enjoy.

Tasks done:

• Implemented a sub menu in the pause menu where you can see the achievements for your current ship type. It was kind of a challenging UI to do because there was many things to factor in. First the number of achievements can change. Then it need to be responsive (like always). Then it need to show all the achievements info in little space. Then it need to get dynamic data at runtime to show the right achievement depending on the type of ship you have. Oh and it need to have a feedback if you already unlocked the achievement. But it wasn’t all that hard. I used a combo of Unity Auto layout and percent placement. All that based on top of an event driven behaviour to get the data.

• Implemented a achievement unlocked notification. It had all the requirements of the previous feature. But with an even smaller UI size. On the plus side, it was more static since it only shows one achievement at a time. So since it was so similar I used some of the things from the sub menu. But I had to create a new thing for the event communication since it wasn’t the same events. Oh and I had to do some simple animations.

• Did a nap. Yep you read that well. The two previous tasks were all that was planned for today. So I rewarded myself with the most time wasting thing I know. It felt great too. But still kept short (around 30min) though.

• Took time to engage more with the reddit gamedev community. I gave feedback on Marketing monday. And took a stroll through the daily discussion thread.

• Followed some people on twitter. Mainly devs from Double Fine. To see what they’re up to. The great thing about twitter is that since I pretty only follow gamedev related accounts, it’s both informative and entertaining at the same time. Even if I can end up spending too much time on it.

• Read a chapter of the marketing book I bought. It’s always interesting. Plus it’s really easy to read. Sometimes it feels like a magazine. This chapter was about brand and the assets to promote it. The more I read it the more I realize I’m not doing much of it right with Rogue Cadet. If I were, there would probably be someone else than me reading this log…

Sprint end: This concludes this small sprint. I now have a working achievement system. I tried to make as flexible as possible, and I’m quite happy with the result. I’ll see if it checks out in the long term.

What went wrong:

• I literally lost a day because of my insecurities. (Yes I’m talking about you day 92). It was just a harsh return to reality. A reality that I had at start but slowly forgot.

What went right:

• I’m pretty happy with the system I designed. It should enable me to create achievement without too much restraints.

• Got a clearer way of my career (at least short term). I know that I’ll do what it takes to finish this project before moving on to other stuff. I more prepared to settle to any game job I can find. I simply can’t afford any luxury of choice given my experience amount.