Cleaning the Cobwebs

Hello friends! I hope you've had a good week. This past week I wanted to talk a little bit about Martian Alchemist and some of the progress I've made in the game. Over the holidays and into the New Year, I had taken a little break from working on my game and spent most of my time working on other projects. The little I did work on my game, however, I mostly created assets that I knew would need to be created anyway. Having been so frustrated with the scrapping of both the map and the potion making station, I felt a little separation from the project was necessary.

So when I opened up Unity the other day, it was like combing through an attic of cobwebs. What was I doing again? The last time I had opened it up, I was working on a shader. Delete. Don't need that any more. I pulled up my game and tried to get my bearings again. I hadn't realized how much information you store in the backgrounds of your brain. You don't even realize you're storing that information until you've stepped away from the project long enough that you eventually forget what you were remembering. (As an aside, the same thing happens to me whenever I open up an open-world game or an RPG–Zelda and Stardew I'm looking at you). Booting up the old memory of a project is like trying to connect to the internet in the dial-up days.

But it felt so good to be back in Unity and to write some code! As I was getting ready to write a script that would highlight the interact-able objects in the game, I realized that I was doing the very thing that I had feared I would do when I first started planning the game: duplicating code. Rather than writing one universal script that could be applied to all the objects (since this was a universal function), I was writing the same code over and over but in lots of different scripts. Frustrated, I realized my mistake, wrote my universal highlight script, and vowed to not do this again moving forward. But rather than trying to retroactively go back and fix my mistake, I'll just apply it to future objects and prefabs. If, as I debug and work on performance enhancements in the future, I'll get rid of the redundant code and swap it for the more modular script.

I was able to finish building out the basic movement of the different tools in the potion making station and I'm happy with the result. There was some trial and error but ultimately I went with simple colliders rather than trying to do some complicated math and messing with the transform properties. And building these functionalities was pretty straightforward and relatively simple. I still need to isolate the colliders so that they don't interact unnecessarily with other objects, but the core function and skeleton is there.

I'm excited to get to work on the shaders next since that's where most of the magic is going to happen. I have some fun plans! There will be some swirling, some bubbling, and some mixing. And don't forget the color changes. And after I get the main shaders working, I am going to go back to the ingredients to fix those so that they can then be put into the different machines and processed.

There's still a lot of work to be done. Sometimes it's overwhelming to think about when I actually try and make a list of all that has to be done before I'm ready to even think about a release date. But rather than get caught up in the mountain of to-dos, I'm trying to just be patient and play the long game. Games are made, after all, just one line of code at a time.

Until next time. Hope you have a wonderful week :)