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.

Today was kinda difficult to motivate myself to do…when the next video is called “Debugging Your Code” and its 11 minutes long and it’s freaking New Year’s Eve and I have no groceries cause I just got back from my trip so I’m starving to death and you know what fuck it I’m done.

Experiment’s over. No more coding, no more chain.

Naw jk I finished it and it has some good stuff. Gotta be honest, I didn’t finish it in one go like normally though. First it talked about the importance of understanding the compiler; the compiler gives you a lot of information on what went wrong, where, and why, and it can be invaluable to deciphering what you did wrong.

Next we went into rubber duck programming. Way ahead of you, devs; not only is this blog serving as my outlet, I’ve got Brenna the Rattata sitting beside me on my desk if I need real-time assistance.

We moved onto a dire warning never to assume, because assumptions can cause fundamental problems when you build your code around them and they turn out to be wrong. I’ve spent enough time making games in Multimedia Fusion to 100% understand that concept; its awful when the problem turns out to be “you copy-pasted stuff into the wrong line” and everything you did was technically correct in your head, you just didn’t lay it out on paper the right way.

Then we moved into the Minimum Viable Test case, a good guideline for removing all extraneous code and narrowing it down to just the code that isn’t working. I’ve done this before, though I prefer the “create a new project that only uses the bit that isn’t working,” an example of me doing that is here. I guess that’s a bit closer to the “Scientific Method” idea they describe after that.

For day 23 I finished catching myself up with the Series. My Number Wizard looks just like his and I playtested it the whole way through, catching bugs and missing a lot of semi-colons. But now we’re on target! I’ll be watching a new video tomorrow.

Since this is a pretty paltry blog post, I thought I’d address a throwaway question my brother had. In order to test my new iOS exporter for Clickteam Fusion I ported Oedipus in my Inventory to Mac and sent it to him to play. He thought it was cute but didn’t get the ‘Content Art’ joke in the gag Collector’s Edition page (click the staff on the main menu to see it).

Well, the ‘joke’is simply that I stole (with minor recoloring) the main character from an old shitty game I made while teaching myself about platforming elements. It’s called ‘Hector’s Odyssey” and if for whatever reason you wanted to see where the shepherd came from, here you go. Sorry I can’t give you the Mac versions, they’re at home on my parent’s desktop and they didn’t have sound anyway.