The Journey Day 6… Hello Monday!
There’s a reason for the idea of catching a “case of the Mondays”. Mondays can be difficult at times coming off the weekend. Not so today. I came into today’s lessons with a strong sense of anticipation. I took Saturday and Sunday off from coding game (partially so I could focus on a smaller amount of web development) and came back fresh and crispy.
Over the weekend I had a chance to do a different kind of homework. Game testing and researching. I’ve had Game Pass on Xbox and a subscription to Apple Games for a bit now. I haven’t really utilized them as much as I feel I should have before getting into game development. It was more like down time. Now that I’m in game development it provides a perfect excuse to get some gaming in. So I took a full advantage of it.
I decided to search for games that were created in Unity. Assault Android Cactus was the first that I came to. I noticed rather quickly many of the development techniques in play that have been explained to us in weekly lectures. Power-up animations, character animations, layering and textures. All in full display. A very beautiful game indeed. Did it play that well? No. Would I recommend it? I deleted it after about 15 mins of playing it. These are definitely not ways I’d like my own game described so by this time I’m pretty glad I decided to take the time to do some research.
I played quite a few shooters. I noticed how power-ups worked. I saw how fun and over the top they can make a good game play. Game, speed ,and control were also key components to the experience. How fast paced was the game? What is the ratio between fire rate to enemy speed? How easy is it to navigate and understand both the UI as well as the game play instructions? Does the game combine the best of all of those elements into a UX that fully engrosses the player in the game? After a few hours of this I was fully ready to get my Monday game on!
Starting the day today, I quickly got into debugging a problem that I was having over the weekend with my triple shot lasers not instantiating in line with the ship. They were instantiating y: -3i back of the ship and were not correctly switching between toggle on and off. It took a bit but I finally realized that I had neglected to place my starting laser position in the instantiate if else loop for my new power-up. Upon fixing that one line, my game was ready to go back into to complete the power-up behavior challenge.
It was at this point that I realized that i had been taught all of the code to complete not just this task but a few additional tasks such as the rest of the power-ups. So i quickly put in my code to make my power up move, gave it a game speed, made it ready to be gobbled up by the player… then created a power-up spawner similar to my monster spawner to take care of creation. I nested my newly prefab’d triple shot inside of the block level spawner and got it all dialed out. I spent the rest of the afternoon helping cohorts debug and find solutions to some problems and then swapped into my web development lecture by it’s mid point.
Nailed it….
Web development is at that fun stage of DOM manipulation right now. Query Selectors, getElementBy , and creating dry functions to build a website manually through javascript continued today. I spent a good amount of time over a three week coding hiatus at Lambda to take an intro to React course so I was by this point familiar with where the applied js lessons were heading.. Into the arms of React. So while lecture was happening I was working my project and listening for anything that i might need in case I got stuck at any point.
Happy monday…
Monday’s can be hard but life is really only as hard as you take it. Having a passion for what you do, having a concern for being the best at it that you can be makes a huge impact. Taking time to really put extra effort into every aspect of your product means alot. As a chef, I can taste when a cook has skipped a seasoning step of over cooked an item or any number of key steps and values. The same can be said about playing a game.
I’ve played a significant amount of video games over the course of my life. Some good and some bad. But in this new phase of game development, all of those hours of experience make a difference. Now that I have a solidly working game that is approaching fantastic controls, i can see more that knowing what a good game feels like and looks like can separate a game that you’re hooked on from a game that you delete minutes after downloading. So as I spent today making sure every aspect was tight before closing down for the day, I was able to look back on my Monday and be thankful for the work done.
