Day 95: Today it snowed. I know incredible right? This really is news worthy. It’s still pretty though. Oh and it’s the first day of the new sprint. I did what I wanted today, which is nice. And if you’re good and read this log, I’ll even put a gif in it.

Daily interesting stuff:

• Is it time for 32 bit retro games? Not sure… It’s kind of ugly.

• Reddit post “freelancers are to hard to work with”. It contains advices of contracts and such.

• Reddit post, summary of an interview of Tim Sweeney. The interview article is much more interesting. It’s about the future of of civilization through VR.

Tasks done:

• Organized the current sprint. I knew from the start that it would be the “Content sprint” and last two weeks. So I put that in writing in trello. Then I went to find the tasks needed for that sprint. Apart from the obvious that was in the top of my head (like upgrades, ships, treasures), I played the game to find some more. I was happy because the game actually plays well. I like the current state. I think that when it’ll be over, I’ll be proud of it (which I can’t say about all the games I’ve made).

• Once the tasks have been written, I started the content sprint with the most obvious… Bug fixes. When I realized bug fixes couldn’t possible be considered content, I just renamed the sprint to “Content & polish” Boom problem solved.

• Fixed a bug where when the player wasn’t in the bounds of the dungeon it would throw errors. The problem was that the player checks if the room he’s in to know if he need to dispatch an event when he changes room. The problem is that it would convert the position into indexes to search in the dungeon matrix. There was nothing to check if the positions indexes were valid. So I added one. It was the most forward fix. But in the long term I should find a better system to know when the player changes room. Because for now the player is tightly coupled to the dungeon map…
  Fixed a bug where the shield of the ships would appears under the ship instead of over. I just had to change the order in the sorting layer. But I had to do this in the two prefabs of the ships. ‘Cause you know, no nested prefabs.

• Fixed a bug where sometimes when the player died, the explosion animation would stop and show a big player instead. This was due to the poorly coded custom animation system I have. I completely forgot that I did a custom stuff for that. And honestly it’s bad. The basic flip book anims are ok but the animator that coordinates them berk… The problem was that the explosion anim could be interrupted when there would be a speed change in the player movement. So I stopped the speed update when the explosion start. I also jumped on the occasion to upgrade the script a bit. I removed an useless loop and used the cached dictionary I already had instead.

• Fixed a bug where there was a collider weirdly placed in a room. It was placed on a floor tile. Resulting in a weird behaviour in game (bullet explode on a floor tile). The hardest part was to find the room in question. I vaguely remembered the problem but I didn’t noted it when I found it (around pre-alpha). So I had to play the game for quite some time (I disabled the player collisions to ease the pain). But I found the faulty room. It turns out it wasn’t an artefact from my collision generation. It’s just that I fucked up in Tiled with this room. The wall layer contained three floor tiled and thus those were marked as colliders. I just had to disable the collider to make it work. I should’ve open Tiled and fixed the map, but I was too lazy for that.

• Fixed a bug where with the shield power, if you moved you could easily take damage. This one boggled me for quite some time. It’s just not fair for the player. So I tried some things to fix this. There were multiple solutions but each time there was a problem. Disabling the rigid body would stop the player. Disabling the collider worked well but could enable you to phase through walls. I struggled to find a correct solution. But in the end I decided to pass the invicibilityTimer variable of the player to public. So when the shield is activated it changes the timer to the duration of the shield. It works great, but it breaks encapsulation…
  Oh right the GIF! I almost forgot. While bug fixing, I realized that I could have as many player ship as I wanted and control them all at the same time. So of course I put 20 of them and made a gif: