Monday, December 17, 2018

As Good A Time As Any

So when I've finished a feeature for my game, I'm usually tired and happy and I want to eat, sleep, go outside, play soccer, something, and not write a blog. If I'm in the middle of adding a feature, I don't want to blog bc I'm busy. And if I'm just starting a new feature, well then what's there to blog about? Which offers you this chilling challenge: to comment below on what stage of feature development I'm in right now!

Anyway.

So this will just be a general update from what I've done in the last month.

I have a playground arena where you can spawn clouds, monster dens, monster pods, empty rock dens, a wrench, gems, dogs, whales, whale equipment. There's two islands that you can land on and take off from and walk around on.

And I have the gauntlet mini-fake-campaign that has 3 levels that are each the same rectangle size with slightly different enemy spawns and one level has a fruit tree and you can fly your flock through the 3 levels and loop through them over and over until your flock meets its bitter end. Your health and water do not replenish, except for the fruit tree on the first of the three levels start with like 12 fruits, but doesn't replenish when you repeat the levels.

And this all kinda works over the internet!!!!!!!!!!!11
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I say 'kinda', bc to test it, I just run two builds of the game simultaneous, enable 'run in background' and then tab between the running applications to play as two different users. Which is awkward and not a thorough way of testing.

I also haven't totally totally finished syncing everything over the network, like espcially if a player joins late, only some of the stuff will sync, but everything should maybe probably work fine if everyone starts together. And I'll confess that I had most of this stuff (that I have mostly working) done before Thanksgiving, which is when I said I'd share something playable. Of course, no one pestered me about failing to meet my promise, which was both a test of you and a test of me, to see how we both handled the psychological damage to our relationship due to the lame predictability of not meeting deadlines. But as I jsut said, I basically coulda met the deadline, I just didn't share it. That's partly because I didn't want to spend Thanksgiving weekend sending out a bunch of emails/Tweets/Instagram posts/Facebook posts/blog posts/Discord messages trying to get testers, or explain how to play, or fix the deluge of bugs, because I'm all about not overworking and really want to hone my ability to not overwwork and because I just wanted to eat and drink and do an escape room with old friends and then eat and drink some more and play Avalon.

But then after Thanksgiving, I got really into adding new enemy sounds and a dynamic enemy-crashing-into-island feature, which I'm very excited about and then I also got really into redoing the water system with using Unity's particle system's built-in collisions, and adding a 'wet skin' feature, and finally learning about Unity's tile map feature, which I may now swap out from my simple one.

Oh, and I also spent like a few days getting the hose's shadow to dynamicly match its position (because I couldn't just use a simple Unity sprite mask, since the hose uses a line renderer) and then beceause the hose can be held at various altitudes (at the standard whale/flying dog altitude or on the island's surface altitude) that meant the hose's shadow has to both show up on the island, which an appropriate offset and sometimes show up on the whale, with a much smaller offset. Anyway, it still doesn't seemlessly match the island's edges, but I'm still surviving without having to learn how to write shaders, which seems like an invesment worth doing..........later.

Also, other than the usual November proceedings of celebrating my birthday, veterans day, and Thanksgiving, in the last month, I went to a wedding in Newport without any single girls, a wedding in Nashville without any alcohol or dancing, and camping in Joshua Tree without a tent.

Hung out with my nieces, played some good and some bad soccer. Went to free yoga on the bluff in Long Beach.

Played Eclipse a few times.

So will I now share my game so people can test it?? Idk. But I'm done blogging!

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