FUCKING DONE WITH THAT DAMN LECTURE. And thanks Christ. I’m genuinely excited for tomorrow because of some new bloody content. Fuck you DBTC method for making me suffer through that damn lecture for four days without letting me put it aside and forget about it, and let me go back to being an ever-pensive wannabe like I want to be.

nah jk we cool. Game path’s 100% working, we are all systems go for tomorrow. Stay tuned for new content tomorrow!

STILL not done with lecture 31, I’m sorry. Its sixteen minutes long and a crapton of stuff happens in it. I’ve also done a bunch of other stuff; an article of mine got 10K views in one day and I completely prepared Twitch software so i can stream my video games, and i downloaded FRAPS and plan to grab photoshop and sony vegas soon to launch my videomaking career.

NOTE: This should have been published yesterday! I finished the article but apparently left it as an unpublished draft. Sorry to leave you nonexistent readers on the edge of your seat

enums are kinda fucking me up. Every time I post what we wanted, it works fine, but he’s asking us to do a unique storyline, and whenever I make any changes it breaks. Dunno why, his says “You see a mirror. Press M to view the Mirror”, and mine says “You see a clipboard. Press C to read the clipboard” but clipboard.exe just doesn’t work. 😦

I’m not rolling my data back again (I’ve come too far) but I’m gonna get up early tomorrow and try to fix the problems so my game works like his. So looks like one more day on Video 31. Last one, I promise.

Also in an attempt to get to know the project better, I watched the wrap-up. I just wanted to see what sort of style the game was in its final stage. I guess I was expecting more of a game with inventory puzzles and all but it’s really more of a Choose Your Own Adventure with static ‘rooms’, and use of inventory puzzles are actually just jumping to different rooms called ‘this room but when you use this inventory item’. That makes coding a wee bit more complicated methinks. But maybe I’ll stick with that, I never liked inventory puzzles anyway and part of my goal was to make Find the Cure! a huge backstory-releasing lore-building experiment for the Darwin’s Soldiers universe. Food for thought.

For what its worth, I wasnt completely useless today. Wrote 3 articles for the Daily SPUF, redownloaded FRAPS, now I’ve just gotta redownload Sony Vegas and Photoshop and I can start back on that whole dream of making videos. While I’m at it, I should sync all my favorite games to Twitch so I can stream while I play. I mean, why not? It’s just me playing, but with the chance for people to watch me. Plus if something badass happens I can keep a record of it.

All right, today’s video completed the text-based adventure game’s story, and presumably sets us up for being done with the game as a whole. Sadly, I merely watched the video but did not follow along in my game because I am dog tired from work this week. Pulled all 40 hours off in four days because Spring quarter’s starting and they said anyone who wants can arrive early every day of the week. But now they said I can’t come back to work because I’d cross the gap into overtime, lol, so I get the rest of the week off. So I’m gonna rewatch the video tomorrow and actually do all the things and then make real progress moving forward in the course once I’ve gotten a full night’s sleep.

And the other reason is I’m gonna have to massively truncate the story. Because as I learn more about how this game is gonna work, I realize that an actually ambitiously-sized text-based adventure game would crumble under the labyrinthine options the game would give. This game is using a “Press X to do thing”-style game and instead of real inventory options, it’s using different chunks of code to represent “the player currently has these inventory items. That means a mere 2 rooms and 2 inventory items would spawn eight different chunks of code, and it’s snowball exponentially from there. So Darwin’s Soldiers Find the Cure! is being shunted into a google doc where I can eventually push it forward into a normal text-based adventure-game-making program like Twine, and I’ll make some unrelated but significantly smaller Find the Cure! for this course.

I made this image before actually re-attempting the video. Let’s hope it’s not foreshadowing of things to come.

Five minutes in: Third of the way done with the video. We’ve added text, colored said text and changed the color of the camera. So far so good.

Eight minutes in: Goddammit. Same problem. He does something in the video to make the variable turn blue but it’s mouse-related so I don’t know what. He adds the line ‘using UnityEngine.UI;’ and then clicks on the word Text and then the word just fucking turns blue…

Update: Found someone in the discussions that has the same problem, everyone tells him not to worry about it and just plow ahead ignoring that the text isn’t blue. Then fuck it that’s what I’m jolly well going to do. Too bad my game’s full of broken scripts and shit now and I’ve got to delete everything and start over to get right of a bunch of listeners or something.

Five minutes in again: Same place. Amazing. Third time really is the charm.

Eight minutes in again: “There are two audio listeners in the scene.” Google says that means I’ve got two cameras. Dunno where the fuck I got those but I tried to follow a yahoo answers post that said: “Click the “Main Camera” from “Hierarchy” panel and remove tick from “Audio listener” component from “Inspector” panel.” But those options dont seem to exist. Even better, I’m the only person to ever have that problem because i searched the entirety of the class’ forum and NOBODY reported that bug before. Guess I’ve got a thread to make.

Otherwise everything works. I think I learned a valuable lesson about not being anal about every infinitesimal detail but I’m not ready to give up on that paranoia just yet; I’m not a real programmer yet but I know what laziness and complacency can do to destroy everything you’ve built. But for now I’m going to sleep…

Not much to say; I redid Lecture 28 today (Creating and Saving Projects) and it went off without a hitch to nobody’s surprise because it went off without a hitch last time. It’s tomorrow’s video with the darn 15-minute coding extravaganza complete with variables that won’t turn blue where things went rocky last time. Fingers crossed.

Lame output, I know, but I started work back up again today, meaning I’ve been answering phones, processing returns and charging credit cards for 7 hours after having to wake up at the impossibly-early wee hours of 11am. So I’m kinda dragging my feet recuperating from being thrust back into the life of a societally-functioning adult. But progress is progress and I’ve run out of BS videos to keep me from having to do the real one.

Welp, I did what I threatened to do and restarted Project 3. Completely clean slate, I just could not solve that damn bug. I did all the bug testing crap they said to do but it wasn’t enough. So we’re starting over. I rewatched the first video, I’ll watch the second and (fingers crossed) third tomorrow, once I’ve recalibrated everything hopefully the problem is solved.

Yeah, I’m bummed too. Plus I start work tomorrow, so this isn’t going to get any easier.

Defs only one video today lads, but blimey it was 15 minutes long!

Created our first script for the new game, and also dabbled for the first time with the user interface. Created a text box and assigned it to the script, and I followed all the rules he followed in the video and the damn variable won’t turn blue. I’ve tried everything, including reinstalling crap. Now technically the code still works perfectly but god I know that’s gonna come back and bite me in the ass at some point, so I won’t continue. I finished the video so I can check off my day but tomorrow no doubt is just gonna be completely restarting in the hopes of troubleshooting this problem.

Seriously what’s wrong with this code? Mine:

His:

Yeah I’m probably gonna just delete everything and restart the video again tomorrow. So stay tuned for the same goddamn thing in my next post. I’m going to sleep.

Man, once again, I really let this blog down. Haven’t posted on it since last year.

But this year is starting off with a bang because we’re making a text-based adventure game! Hell yeah! Using nothing but inventory puzzles and text, we’re going to tell a simple story about a prisoner escaping from a cell. Exciting!

I’m not interested in using their plot either; I’m going bold. I’m telling my OWN plot. I also read through all the design documents, of which there were multiple, so I’m counting that as my second video. Cleaning day here at the house, I’m doing all the dishes and lugging the recycling out to the curb.

UPDATE: I lied, I kept going! Created the new project, ignored the part where I’m supposed to download a title card named ‘Prison’ (got my own instead from this helpful site) and now we’re ready to start making this game. Im super jazzed about making a text-based adventure game, they’re one of my favorite genres, so I’m moving faster than usual)

Near Year’s Eve is upon us, and it’s time for some New Year’s Resolutions. I’ll be making those, but not on this blog. I’m spending enough time learning Unity and the ‘Don’t Break the Chain’ is working fine enough that I don’t think I need the additional help.

Matter of fact, I’m upgrading. Starting this new yer, I’m going to try and do two videos a day.  After all I’m only hurting myself by taking my time. I am by no means committing to the doubled workload. On off-days I’m only doing a single video, but I’m going to try and move things along in the hopes of getting to my actual dream of making completely unique games. To that effect, I took the Section 2 end quiz and watched the “Wrapping things up” video today so we can get into the good stuff tomorrow; Section 3, where we make a text-based adventure game. I’m excited.