TOE week 50: Pressing START

Last week I said that I was going to START working on a level. This level is supposed to be a vertical slice. Something to show off to important people or maybe a crowd of people. I don’t know when this switched, but when I was a kid if you gave me a blank piece of paper I would fill it up with a drawing. Without hesitation. With a blimp, a monster, an astronaut with a hover board and whatever else my 8 year old brain could think of. I would just START drawing. Now if you hand me that same blank paper I have to contemplate what is the purpose of this astronaut and his hover board, what is his motivation, who is he? Is THAT his blimp? Working on a project as large as this one is gives me the advantage of never really needing to know what am I supposed to draw.

I deleted almost everything in the new VS level and was faced with absolute Tabula Rasa. Where should I START?

I had a conversation with a friend at a coffee shop about this very thing. I told her that I had been working on this project for about a year. She thought that was great but how do you START? Personally this game I am working on has existed in my head since at least 2009. I have had dreams about playing this thing. I had worked on it in XNA, drew sprite sheets, concept art, propaganda. But it was always something that I was going to do when I had X. X being a programmer, or more time, or motivation, or inspiration, or two dozen other excuses that stopped me from moving forward.

NONE of that matters! Do you have a thing you want to accomplish? I can give you the best advice that was ever given to me right now. START! Just START. This is the single biggest thing standing in your way right now. If you are always waiting to be ready you may never be ready. So you have to START. But what if I fail? If you never START you have already failed. Hell it may not even work out you may try and the results may suck but at least your idea now exists.  

“You can’t depend on motivation. Motivation comes and goes. What matters is discipline. Are you putting in the work to achieve your goals? That is what it is about.”  Brandon Carter. <-That dude is my freaking hero. 

I can’t tell you that it is going to be easy. More than likely it will be hard and difficult. I would be lying to you if I said that there has been zero self doubt while working on this. There are coding problems that I don’t or didn’t know how to solve. There were days when I wanted to strangle a line of code. “WHY AREN’T YOU WORKING! WHY ARE YOU BREAKING MY GAME!” This IS hard for me sometimes. Everyday I press START and continue forward on this thing. Some days I get in very little work because of real life getting in the way. But even on the days when little happens I still press START on work.

So what is the next step in accomplishing your goals? START. 

The day after I had this conversation was the day that I STARTED working on my VS level. I have to continue following my own advice. 

The idea of quitting was more scary than the idea of STARTING putting in the work. 

So I STARTED.  

TOE week 49: Excuse My French

Blarg. You know it is a good blog when you have not updated in two weeks and it starts with a swear word.  Unfortunately I realized that I have been doing this wrong.  I wanted to make customizable bits that I can use to create a level basically out of legos. Now this works but many blogs ago I basically said that you should white box your level first and then art it. I kind of ignored this and did the reverse. The problem is that I am ignoring the design and constraining it to the artwork. This is a bad idea. It is supposed to be the other way around. This is harming me in three ways; 1 making a fun level, 2 the amount of space I have to control in the background is ever increasing, and 3 it is killing my productivity the very thing it was supposed to greatly help. 

I have also decided that I am going to start making a level. Mainly because I think I have enough objects to put something together that is small maybe but still interesting. I have decided to make a level the way we did it on the Batman game I made. Whitebox it when the design is good, art it. You know the freaking industry standard. Sometimes there are reasons for the way we do things. Though I am also not going to throw away my title sets going to use them to create the art after design is finished. 

In other more productive news. I made a parallax background element this week that had some problems. I asked my Facebook friends what they thought about it. Mainly so I could suss out what wasn’t working with it I settled on this. 

The size of it made me reduce the size of the Factory and the Ziggurat. The tower is supposed to be large and imposing so the other two needed a slight adjustment. Wound up looking like this. Might still need to be smaller. 

Two weeks ago I burned myself out a bit so last week I did some easy tasks. My game can now spawn a sub weapon pickup on the destruction of a lamp. Sub weapons now use the game’s default gravity and collide with the collision objects instead of just floating. I can specify what subweapon spawns on the lamp’s destruction. This is not terribly well implemented but it WORKS. More maybe later.

Also now when the player dies they disappear then are teleported to the last checkpoint they hit. So I have a working check point system in the game now. Somewhat rudimentary but it works!

I was also drawing a fair amount over the last two weeks. I have finally filled up my sketch book! I have been meaning to make some concept art for the tower in the past and future. So I have been sketching some of the new designs into the future tower concept.

TOE week 48: AttackTheProblem();

It was a whirlwind week this week. I talk to computers I am not a coder, yet. I mean most of my methods for getting the programming done is basically dragging my face along a cheese grater until one of us gives up. This is how I attack the problem. It is an ugly method and one with various flaws but the work gets done. A task that I have had on my ToDo list for some time was simply to show my work to an actual programmer and have them look over the things that I have been doing that could be improved. 

Similar to the tabs and spaces argument there is this:

if(!thing){

}

Vs

if(!thing)

{

}

I was so inconsistent about this. You have to pick one. Honestly I like that top version but Visual Studio is default to the lower version. So fighting with it every time was not something I was willing to do. My programmer friend he told me how to set my rules and then format the document so that all of the existing code gets this treatment. My code is much more consistent in this regard now!

When I talk about cheese grading my face in how I work when I program that is probably also how I work with art and design as well. If I were to write it in code it would like something like this:

if (workToBeDone){

AttackTheProblem();

}

This method has some disadvantages. Mainly frustration tends to build up over time. For example I was working on my player death function. When the player health is zero make the player start to fade away. The strange thing was that I could get them to fade in from nothing but not fade out. I kicked the proverbial tire of this problem until I was just so frustrated that my wife thought I should work on something else. Not being cool headed at the time I chose to continue with cheese grading my face against this problem.

Turns out my code was actually working but the fade speed was too low. I would make a change in code run the game look at the player not fading be sad. Stop the game edit code and process would repeat. AttackTheProblem(); It is really hard to fix something that is actually working! I only realized that it was working when I pulled the slider in the inspector and the player disappeared a bit. I spent a day on this death function and some of that time was wasted.

The next day I was fighting with the UI again. I was trying to make my Player Health UI populate a Grid instead of populate a single column. Then I needed to flip the graphic if the population was above 10. Getting the grid to populate with my objects was easy BUT getting them to be the right scale was not. Again I cheese graded my face on this problem. It eventually worked but it took a whole day fighting with it. It wasn’t because this was difficult, it was because scale and parented objects are weird in Unity sometimes. It wound up looking like this: 

Then I didn’t work for two days because I was AttackingTheProblem(); IRL because one Government agency said that another Government agency lost all of my paper work. And a completely different Government agency wanted a bunch of different paper work so my car is in fact still a car. 

I got a ton of little things done after IRL was over. Player raycast while ducking now adjusts allowing the player to duck and slide under things. I got an enemy working who moves around similar to the player using the raycast controller. I fixed my melee attack problem 97% of the time. The last 3% still is bugged but it now works much better. I fixed a bug my friend found last week where the player would get stuck at the end of the ducking attack animation if the duck input is released during the attack. I made artwork for the primary attack finally. 

So much AttackingTheProblem();.

Then the next day I was just burned out. I tried to work but I couldn’t get anything done. My wife asked me when was the last time I played a game? I didn’t know. Being cool headed at the time I chose to continue working and managed to get a render texture to appear on an object through script. This is helpful because you can’t prefab a render texture. WELL you can BUT instead of using the camera at your new camera’s location it will use the camera from the prefab. Not helpful. So creating it in code allows you to build it into the prefab. This mostly worked with some caveats.

I probably just need to take my wife’s advice. 

If(workToBeDone && burnout <= 10){

PlayAGame();

}