Very little to report today. Video was on porting code over from the first game. Now, ther’s a bunch of bugs and stuff but they’re gonna fix it in the next video, so awesome. Personally I didn’t mind the day off, this is the last week of Back to School rush so i got to relax. But I did bike 35 minutes instead of 20 because i just didnt notice the time had flown by.

For the first time since starting this project, I just forgot to make a blog post. Sorry about that. But I did do a video yesterday, honest!

Yesterday we learned how to connect scenes, now I can jump from scene to scene by clicking buttons. Today we expanded on that and created a web that allows me to jump around from frame to frame. We also learned about the importance of a Game design document, which I already know.

And that’s all we’re doing because I’m dog tired. Got up at 7:15am to make an eye appointment, which happily enough says that my vision is now 20/15 (I got lasik done in October). Loving the eyeglasses-free life still, but immediately after that I needed to bus down to work and get my 8 hours in from 11 to 7:30, meaning my day was basically 12.5 hours long. Time to go bike for twenty minutes and then fall asleep…

God, I’ve been having the most maddening bug. Halfway through the new video which focuses on adding scripts to switch scenes by clinking on buttons, I get this thing where the buttons just don’t respond. Couldn’t figure out why, they were set correctly but they just didn’t reply, even though they worked last video. I was so confused, nothing had changed why wouldn’t they work? D:

Because I deleted the Event System thinking I’d created it while making an improper Level Manager, which I made as an empty object to attach scripts to. I don’t get why we aren’t attaching the scripts directly to the buttons but presumably there’s a good reason. So the scripts to jump between the Start and Quit screen are live, I can jump from frame to frame like a boss, and we are making progress.

Didn’t get the challenge, but in my defense it required using QuitRequest, something never before alluded to or mentioned. Is there some outside research I’m supposed to be following beyond the videos themselves? I sure hope not, and I feel I’ve got the hang of things even without whatever hypothetical extracurriculars there could be. Also got 3/4 on the quiz, only failing to note that this version of the UI was not available before Unity 4.6.0.

Got my 20 minutes done in style by calling Grandma at the same time. It worked but I don’t think I’ll make a habit of it, it was kinda distracting.

And we’re all caught up on videos! I did TWO today to make up for yesterday’s day off. Now we have a bunch of text boxes and we learned how to easily add new elements to the game’s interface, especially the ‘duplicate’ feature which I remember making great use of in Clickteam fusion. I’ve really gotta start that course that teaches CTF to me, I’d love to get back into the swing of that.

Video 2 was the one bout Start buttons, now not only do we have buttons, they change color when highlighted and even when clicked, which means they’re officially more advanced than the start buttons I coded on CTF. Though in hindsight I know how to code buttons like that in CTF if I had to go back and do it. CTF is pretty awesome, can’t recommend enough.

Biked for 30 minutes today without even noticing. That’s getting easier and easier. Man, these new year’s resolutions are just fulla surprises on what you can accomplish if you get something done every day.

Yeah, no real excuse here. I slept all day.

I just rewatched that 45-second video from Course 3, I know it did nothing to further my coding career and today was basically the first day off I’ve taken. Instead I started collecting footage for my upcoming video. The Daily SPUF is a mere 15 days away from being at its 1000th article, and Medic and I thought it’d be cool if we had a video, and used that video to springboard both of our budding desires to become video content creators. I’m thinking of adapting my old “On Shooters” series into videos with visuals, but Medic thinks I need ‘something for people to rally behind’. So I might do it on all the fucking Valve trading delays. They’ve put so many damn ways to stop someone from giving something to someone else…

But I’m gonna need a microphone in order to record my voice, so I grabbed one. And threw in a webcam while I was at it. And touched up my Twitch account so it didn’t look like shit. And connected all my Favored games to Twitch’s OBS. I earned my day off all right???????????

Got my 20 minutes of biking done at least >:

Damn thing is still there where MonoDevelop autocorrects your code. Guess I’m memorizing the trick where you ctrl-z after it screws things up but it still lets your edited code through.

I watched the next video “How to add a Start button” but I was too tired to actually do the work. Back-to-school-week is kicking my ass, I’ll add the start button tomorrow and then do another video on top (a bloody 13-minute video called “adding text”). Next week’s gonna be just as busy, but after that it’s going to calm down supposedly. So I’m making the bucks right now so I won’t have to later.

Back-to-School week is kicking my fucking ass, man. I’m getting more of a workout running around grabbing people’s orders and textbooks than I am from my 20 minutes of daily biking.

But I got the next video done; saving projects and creating and saving scenes. Very simple stuff, you just make new scenes and save them. Also went back and watched the old videos giving advice on installing Unity to make sure I had my settings correct, cause my monodevelop does this annoying thing where it auto-corrects your code to what it thinks you ment and its usually wrong. Found the way to disable that under Tools > Options > General (the one under Text) > uncheck ennable code completion. Maybe I’ll turn it on later if I notice a distinct increase in coding errors, but it never seemed to catch my missing semi-colons or anything of the usual suspects.

Here we are on day 43! For those of you keeping score, I’ve completed 15% of the course. Rock on.

Today they explained a little about object-orientation and how it relates to code. Like, a common part of creating objects is to design instances which function as templates. Every time you want a human in your game, you spawn one from a template with the necessary flags active (Spawn human, type=zombie, team=hostile, skin=4 that sort of thing). Right, I can get behind that. Onward and forward.

Also I cycled for 20 minutes. Easy stuff really. It’s Back-to-School week at work so I’m taking it kinda slow.

Aw crap, I’ve got to cycle for 20 minutes. Hold on.

…kay. Today’s video, as expected, was content-free. Dudes talked about how we’re going to be adding a user interface to the Number Wizard game so that you’ve got things to look at. That sounds fair enough, I’m excited to continue. Work changed my schedule, now I’m 9:30-6 instead of 11-7:30 which I’m hella down with because it gives me more of a life after work.

Responses to “Find the Cure!” were larger than I expected. itch.io analytics reports that almost thirty people clicked through to my game, more than I expected considering the habits of my friends, so I’m considering that a plus.

And today’s video is that 0:57 second one saying congrats on finishing Course 3. Of course there’s not much left for Course 3, we published it! It’s live baby!

And, in my particular case, it’s been completely chronicled on the Darwin’s Soldiers Wiki, because I’m a total sucker for encyclopedic writing. Plus the game is like, super short. But I’m still damn proud. This is my first completed video game project, and I’ve already sent it to like, EVERY single circle of friends both on and off the internet. Here it is again, in case you missed it.

But we’re not stopping there. We’re moving on to Course 4; Number Wizard UI. Back to that console-only Guess Who? ripoff, sounds like we’re giving it a little bling. Bring it on.

Also in honor of Martin Luther King day and just general health and fitness, I’m adding a new daily routine to my repertoire; I bought an Exercycle and I’m gonna do 20 minutes of cycling every day. Lemme start taking care of my body as well as my mind.