Day 98: Today, it snowed again. But this time it was more impressive. Everything was covered of it in a short time. Also it’s friday. So that means after I finish writing this It’s the weekend! That’s cool, but what’s scary is that my TODO list for this sprint doesn’t seems to reduce. There’s a ton of stuff left to do and only one week. Hope I’ll make it. It’s the last sprint before the alpha milestone (excluding the “marketing sprint” that comes right after this sprint) so I thought I might crunch if need be.

Daily interesting stuff:

• Reddit post, rants on half life 3. It’s funny because when devs do speculations, it’s about how the corporate structure kills their thing. Or how it can’t possibly live up to the expectation.

• Reddit post, things to watch out when open sourcing. The most interesting stuff is the quotes from the video game attorney. He’s a reddit gamedev users that gives law advices.

• Finding voice talent based on budget. Cool links in there.

Tasks done:

• Implemented lasers! This is so cool. I freaking love lasers. Too bad it doesn’t look that good. At first I thought it wouldn’t take long. I was wrong. It was a pain in the ass to make. The concept itself is not that hard. You need to have a start a middle and an end. Then you raycast forward to see if you hit anything. Then you stretch the middle part to match the appropriate length. But if you take into account stuff like making the sprites, properly managing the layers, assets pivots and stuff like that, it quickly becomes a long long task. Especially when you realise you actually need it to work with the other systems like UI, special powers and Weapon switching. Then you realise that the beautiful script you just wrote needs to behave like a weapon. But it can’t since the Weapon class is made to work with bullets. So you change the whole thing to inherit from a BaseWeapon class. You spend a lot of time juggling with existing code to see what needs to be in the base and what is specific. And that’s painful. Oh and I almost forgot the enemies. Yes because you see, enemies damage worked with bullets and they are one shot being. So you need to make the enemies detect constant damage. But then you realize that the bullets are suddenly considered constant damage for 3-6 frames. So you can around trying to find why. And then you fix it. And then you have a kick ass laser. And then you do a GIF of it and post it on twitter because you’re proud. And then nobody sees it because you suck at PR. Did you notice how I used you to distance myself from this unpleasant memories (did you also noticed how I suddenly changed the meaning of “you”). Ok I’m exaggerating, it was actually fun. I love coding, and I love challenging stuff. Plus you know lasers.

• Looked at how to do a portfolio for a programmer. I did this because I started watching a GDC talk at lunch. But it was for artists. And a lot of things were hard to translate for programmers. So I looked at stuff that I could use.

• Started to work on the weapons. I actually had a nice surprise finding I already did most of the weapons I wanted for the alpha. Then I worked on lasers. Then I tried them. Then I tried some other weapons. Then I realised that it could really use some improvements. Then I made some. Then I realized it was already late. Then I had a small internal struggle between wanting to go to weekend and wanting to finish this. Weekend won. So see ya on Monday.