Gamedev

I haven’t really been preparing all that well for the previous Ludum Dare jams that I’ve taken part in. My cousin has always been at the forefront of design when we approach this. This time round he’s away for the weekend and we won’t be jamming together, so on the eve of theme announcements I’m quickly putting together some small ideas to try and help me have some direction if it’s not the theme I was hoping for. ...

I’ve been a bit quiet this weekend as I needed to unwind a bit. It was a mostly unproductive weekend from my side, but I did manage to build the flak cannon’s shell tonight, which is basically saying that the flak cannon is done because we’re just swapping out the ammunition for the desired effect. With relative ease I managed to setup a shell to reuse the explosion logic from the bomber, this time just with a timed “fuse” instead of just exploding on impact. ...

Not much to report except we now have explosions! Matt had done a lot to fix my attempt at producing explosions and I must admit it looks great. I ended up doing a lot more reading on ScriptableObjects as well and we played a little Fortnite Battle Royale before we went to bed so not much more to update on. I am happy though that the bombers are done. Matt has already taken on some UI for the requisition shop and I’ll be looking into the flak cannon next since that’ll likely reuse the explosion component we’ve built for the bomber. ...

I’m only writing this update for the day after the Day 21, because it is my birthday on Day 22 and I was quite busy with going to visit my mom who was in town for training. I spoke to quite some extent with Matt about some of the issues I ran into with building the bomber and he took a look at the bugs I had. From what I can see he’s fixed it as there might have been a flaw in the PoolingFactory which caused some strange behaviour to present itself with the shrapnel I was trying to implement. ...

I’ve made quite a bit of progress on the bomber I’m building. I reused the plane Matt had made and attached a place where a bomb can be dropped from on the botttom of it. I then went about writing a script to spawn a bomb at that position, but without realizing it I never added a condition to stop spawning and ended up with the below fail. I still counted it as a massive success and as soon as I fixed my logic I started working on the explosion for the bomb. ...

Sadly my day has been filled with crisis upon crisis. Work was quite hectic even though I only got in later during the day and I had to deal with a personal issue when I got home. Nothing to really update, still have to implement some “targeting” to allow the bombers flying over to drop the bomb semi accurately. I’ve asked Matt to have a look at creating the health component for the bunker. ...

My pondering on how to approach the bomber has paid off! I ended up drawing a little bomb called tiny. I put in my best attempt at using my own limited set of programmer art skills and made the sprite seen below. I’ve also managed to reuse the solution Matt had used for the parachutes on the paratroopers in that all I did was to attach a rigidbody game object to the tail area of the bomb and have it apply some linear drag. ...

Today was probably the worst unproductive day ever. I had to run some errands without knowing when exactly it would happen so it put quite a damper on my willingness to sit down and work. I did however just have a quick planning session with Matt where we reorganized our Trello board into a lit of features that can come in. He also asked me to have a good look at his object pooling and I must say I was quite impressed. ...

I actually awoke on day 12 realizing that I never wrote and published an update. Yesterday was extremely slow going for myself and Matt from what I’ve seen. I spent my day lounging at home with my wife binging Mindhunter while pondering way to fix the airplane bug. Matt had mentioned to me that he did some work on object-pooling which I believe is no easy task. I thought I’ve given him access to a repository that has some details on how I’ve approached it previously, but he said he had no access. ...

What a slow day it’s been. Entelect’s year end function is tomorrow so most of today consisted of just trying to finish up and get ready for what’s happening tomorrow. From my side I’ve dug up some code to show Matt how I approached object pooling in another project. I also recorded the below soundclip a few days ago, but I had not figured out how to turn it into a continuous loop. ...