Little Vacation

I’m taking a break 🙂 There is lots of stuff happening around me currently, new Internet, waiting for a new Pc and having to make my home “childsafe”. So I decided to take a break from my project for 1 or 2 weeks 🙂
Also, there is not much summer left and here in Finland it’s definitely short, so I should go and use it 😀

aggressive motivational speech :D

This weekend is so damn full with things XD and a sudden urge to find out, if there is an “easy” way to make own websites nowadays, since last time I looked into that stuff was…well, when I was 15 years old? (I’m only counting those I actually published).
And yeah, it is alot easier now and I like it alot, that theoretically one can build a simple website in just 5 minutes.
Even good looking ones 🙂
Here a link for a website I just started for a community project I’m leading within the sandbox mmorpg wurm online:
http://magranonsscar.weebly.com/
It’s nothing really fancy yet and some of the elements are not positioned as I would like them to be, but for just a bit experimenting it’s a pretty good outcome and gives me hope that it won’t be so difficult afterall to make a website for my game and myself anymore.

And for those who are still struggling with motivation :D:

for my taste I was already too long absent :o

Since a few days I seem to be sick or something similar. I wanted to work on my game and write into my blog and I wanted to do alot of other things at home, but I always was too tired to even think properly I don’t even know where it’s coming from and what to do about it…it’s really annoying.
The only thing I know is, that it has nothing to do with motivation, maybe I’m having some kind of burn-out?
Sometimes I wished, I would have started this way earlier, but I don’t think it’s a good idea to dwell in “what could have been” or “what ifs” in general.

Hm…now that I think about it, it’s possible that I did indeed got a little bit stuck, because every time I thought about my game, I felt like I’m a bit aimless. Because I have not really defined what exactly my next goal is.

Additionally I feel overwhelmed everytime I’m thinking about making the action bar, since I really don’t know where to approach it from. Interestingly, I was reading about this issue regarding Indie Game development (or any kind of self determined work) that it usually means, that I have not split my tasks into small enough chewable pieces. Because all the overwhelmedness comes from not being able to see how much I need to do to reach my goal.
Oh yeah! That makes alot of sense!
Hah 😀 Thanks Blog for making me write down my thoughts and come to some kind of revelation XD

I guess I have to go through my plans again and see where I can break down goals into smaller ones 🙂

GUI again :D or still…

I was asked, why I had not made my last update with a gif animation of my Healthbar…and well, now I have 🙂
I simply never had any reasons to look into how to make gifs, but I can see how it’s mesmerizing to watch something moving 😀

So, for my update, today I was actually managing to make it work properly! That means, the healthbar stops reducing at zero health and the damage is a float number counted from every enemy that is close enough to “trigger” an attack on the dragon. It also accounts for every enemy being slain, that it won’t keep on counting down when enemies already died.
Aaaand since some friends told me that updating every frame to check for an enemy that only hits every second, could become heavy on performance at some point, I changed it to update every 0.1 seconds 🙂

Only thing I don’t like at the moment, is how the numbers are so small, I don’t think it poses any challenge for players, if the health is going down only 0.01 per second from every enemy reaching it’s goal.
But thats for later, when I start polishing the game 😀

In overall this day was good, even though I was stressed with my code looking messy (or atleast I perceive it that way)

yep…that sums it how I feel about my code.

Now…just what to do next…random enemy spawns? more spells? making the actionbar work? 🙂 Let’s see what I will crave for most.

(sorry for all those smilies, it’s a sign I feel relatively good today)

and as a little bonus, because I just felt like sketching some dragonlands stuff: Rat Alchemist 😀

GUI and stuff

So I created a healthbar (finally), that even works….well, kinda XD it’s decreasing it’s value over time, I can also reverse it, but I’m still looking for a good way to measure when and how often enemies are damaging the dragon and I have not yet fully grasped how I can use time.deltatime in every occasion.
I’m even starting to think, that I maybe should create some kind of universal timer, for the whole scene, that I can access in my scripts, instead of creating new methods for every time I need some kind of timer.
It’s going forward slowly, but sometimes I really wished I could be faster and knowing what I’m actually doing, but hey, thats exactly what I’m learning for, so that some day I can actually make such things, without needing to struggle so much with syntax and possibilities that I’m simply not aware of atm.

That said, a little screenshot of my current GUI:

Discard! I think it’s important to do from time to time

Finally, I got my daughter to sleep. It was really a struggle today, since she suddenly got aware of it that I could be “away” from her, creating separation anxiety.
So even though she wants to sleep, because of tiredness, she clings to me until the last moment when her eyes are just falling involuntarily. Which of course also means, that I’m not getting as much sleep as I would like to and it resulted in me, taking the weekend off from developing, so I could hopefully find some time to rest.
It didn’t work out so well and I just got anxious about not doing anything, not writing anything in my blog and in general not feeling like enjoying any games, which would be my “usual” way of relaxing.
It’s very frustrating for me, that I now look at those games and more than ever before I’m seeing all those flaws…all those things I would like to do different and most of all, how much more gratification I’m getting from developing, than a game could ever give me.

So now, I’m sitting infront of my screen, have opened my project and I have no idea, how I wanted to tackle my next step, about toggling spells with my action bar. I had an idea about how to make a better character and camera movement with help of an empty gameobject, so I could stop using the unity in build first person controller … but I have no idea anymore what exactly that idea looked in my head, which way I thought I could maybe code it and why I thought it would have been so simple “solution”.
I don’t even know how much time I have until she wakes up again O.o
Or if the “taking time off” is actually the reason of why this happened now. I doubt it, it’s more likely I just did not sleep well enough and my head just got “out of it”, but I’m sure, if I would just watch some programming videos or read through the code I had written before, it would come back to me.
And I think, best thing I can do currently, to stop the anxiety in me, is deleting the empty gameobjects I made in unity, just discarding them, because it has no use to me, if I don’t remember how I wanted to use them. It just makes me feel bad, about not being able to remember, even if there is maybe a completely different solution for it, that I simply can not see at the moment, because I’m so fixated of doing it the old way.
I have experienced something similar before, when i was writing stories or drawing pictures, that there is a point, when you stop in the middle of a project and don’t touch it for too long time, that you think you never could possibly finish it, because you are just not in the same mood anymore as you where when you started it and that the result that would come out of it NOW would definitely not be what your “past self” would have wanted.

I’m gonna have to tell myself: “It’s a lie!” My past self and my now self, both want to have the image finished, even if it doesn’t turn out as I first thought it would be, but as long as I don’t have it finished I’m always gonna look back at it and be “sad” about a missed opportunity, about a not finished project and can tell myself how “great” it would have been, if I would have just finished it.
This is not only twisting my perception on myself away from the reality, it’s also demotivating me to start anything new, because I think I need to finish it right NOW or I will never finish it.
Did you ever notice how children tend to build up towers with wooden blocks or lego or whatever and then destroy them? Just to build something new and usually better? yes, that’s EXACTLY what I need to do now. Discard.

No, I don’t need to throw away my whole project, it’s enough to just discard, what is hindering me of progressing further (since I’m an adult I can logically assess my situation and adapt, atleast I hope so 😛 ).

Dragon concept again :D

I went through the whole beginner tutorial of unity yesterday and phew, it’s quite exhausting. I tried to concentrate to write down information that I could easily forget and everything else I just try to keep in my mind as “reference” of what i can do while programming, since that was quite a big issue before: not knowing the possibilities of what tools I even have available to do things in unity.
Now it feels though, that if not using a very “complicated and special” game mechanic, that games in general can be prototyped in a relatively short time.

Also, last night I had a bit of a “I need to draw” situation, which led to me trying to make a more proper concept of a dragon, or in this case, more likely to be an hatchling. I’m gonna work on finishing that, aswell as the header, when I need some off time from programming again 😀 (and having some off-time from my baby) I actually like this one alot more then the rhino kind of dragon XD

Programming Joys…

I don’t really understand how some of the tutorials aimed at Beginners are actually explaining less, than those aimed at higher advanced programmers O.o and why would code be made in an inconsistent way, which would lead to more likely making mistakes?
Like as example, I just watched a tutorial that explained “if” statements or it was supposed to do so, but then he has 2 “if” statements where on one side, he is using the scope and on another part he isn’t and then I’m wondering like why? Why would you do something like that aimed at beginners? It’s just coincidence, that I actually had an issue with something like that from another tutorial, where i tried to add some functionality in form of additional “if” Statements and tried to “Debug.Log” it, just to find out, that without using the scopes, everything would run at the same time (kinda), so I couldn’t actually get the information WHICH of those ifs was firing…it could have been prevented to just ALWAYS use the scope, even if it is not really necessary…just to keep consistent and avoid problems later on, when you have already forgotten about it.

I will probably try to “just” continue programming after I’m done with some of the basic tutorials…somehow I felt like I was learning so much faster by just making a tons of mistakes XD so maybe those developers that suggested to “just start” are actually right…sure it feels like you are not really getting forward in the beginning, but therefore you get very fast alot better in asking the right questions 🙂 Learning how to be more precise with what you need and WHERE something exactly is not running the way you want it.
I don’t know how many times I was really close to an answer, all by myself, just by excluding and experimenting and when I asked someone for help I felt like “aaaaaahhhh I knew it was somewhere there” which is somehow also a little bit satisfying, that i was atleast close, but just couldn’t see what I needed to change, because I lacked some basic information.

I hope it will get better soon.