It was an ok week. I had the same issue that I had the previous week – nothing got done during the weekdays.
- Abilities architecture overthinking. I’m spending way too much time figuring out the architecture for abilities. I have a vision for a clean, highly-extensible, Unity editor-driven solution but I haven’t been able to get there. This weekend I’m forcing myself to finish this and move on. There are plenty of ways for me to accomplish this goal that aren’t perfect but are workable.
- Saving/Loading working again. Saving/loading has been a pain point throughout development. Many changes break it, causing me to wonder if I’m going about it in the correct manner. Since I don’t often test saving/loading, when I do test, there are always a few issues to fix, and these issues are usually not simple fixes. Testing saving/loading every time I make a change would be too cumbersome; maybe I’ll add automated testing of this feature in the future. Anyway, saving/loading is working again. Since I’m reworking the code less these days, I expect to have fewer saving/loading issues in the future.
- Rework – cell selection support in actions. Many actions (melee attack, ranged attack, open, take, drink, etc.) require a target. In the main game context, the target is determined by where the player clicks. In other contexts, such as clicking an item in the hotbar, the target is determined by prompting the player to select a cell. Early on, I built the cell selection handling into the ranged attack action. I knew I’d have to eventually extract it but I wanted to get ranged attacks working quickly and I wasn’t clear on all the other potential uses of cell selection. This week I moved the cell selection code into its own class and made it easy to use from any action.
- Fixed some non-fatal, recurring exceptions. I got tired of seeing the same errors in the logs on every playthrough. They didn’t actually break anything in the game, but they cluttered the log. I removed the several most common errors.
- Posted pixel artist ad on r/GameDevClassifieds. I still need to post on Pixel Joint and 1-2 other places.
- Wrote the first half of a post on time-tracking. Last week I stated that I was going to post the findings from meticulously tracking my game dev time over the past four weeks. There are some interesting observations but I realized that I need a larger sample size for some of those observations to be meaningful. I’m going to collect another four weeks of data and reassess if I have enough for a post.
Next week, there will definitely be some new abilities in the game.
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