To Do…
So this past week I struggled a little bit with motivation to finish the mobile version of Space Cats (if I’m being totally honest and transparent with you). I knew the work that needed to be done but I was just lacking the drive to open up Unity, open up my code editor, and work on the project. But I didn’t want the project to stall so I told myself: okay, just make a list of things you have to do and check off one thing, one day at a time.
The first thing? Write down a list of all the things I need to do off the top of my head.
Check.
Second: Make a separate copy of the game, copy it over to GitHub, and set up all the initial stuff in Unity and my laptop. (By the way, I decided to make a separate version because I knew I’d be changing quite a few things and I wanted to keep desktop separate from mobile.)
Check.
Third: Import different character sprites and add their animations.
Check.
Fourth: Start writing the code.
Still in progress…
What’s funny is that breaking down the tasks like this really helped my motivation. Yesterday and today I was able to write quite a bit of code and though my list of bugs/things to fix is growing, so is my enthusiasm for the project.
Today I worked mostly on getting the different character sprites to change depending on the player’s selection and then having that character selection persist beyond the different scenes. Here’s the bulk of the code I wrote:
It mostly works but I still have some bugs: namely the character selection only works if you start the game, and then quit before changing again. It doesn’t work in game 😂😭
At least I have a UI that I'm happy about. I played around with a few different UI options to indicate character selection and most of them looked bad. Stuck with artists’ block, I started Googling/Pinteresting other examples to see how other devs solved that. I also downloaded a couple of mobile games to see how they handled character selection. Finally, I settled on just a very simple grayed out vs full brightness to indicate which character was selected.
If you know how to read code, you might notice that in the SetSelection method, the logic is opposite of what you might think. But it’s because when the selection box is active, that means that the character is grayed out, which means that the player hasn’t chosen that. I know. A little confusing. I messed it up a few times and I’m the one who came up with this logic lol. Genius. I know. 🙄 I’m sure there’s a simpler way to handle it and someone more logically oriented is probably chuckling right now. I had to write down the logic just so that I didn’t mess up the code when I wrote it.
Anyway, I hope to hurry and finish Space Cats mobile because several of you have mentioned that you don’t have Steam and I would really love for you guys to be able to play my game. But for those of you who have played the Steam version, what’s your high score? Bet you can’t get past 200… 😘
See you guys next week.
