Day 11–11/6/20
Looking at a program can be incredibly daunting and overwhelming, but as you break each aspect down into little challenges, things start to seem much more achievable. From this short journey so far, it is crazy looking back down the mountain to see how far each step has taken me, yet there is still so much to take in and learn. I’m definitely excited to see where I am in even just a couple more weeks.
Anyway, back to the programming. Today I had finished a fair amount of programming. I was able to add the ammo count without much trouble, then added a debuff in the form of a poison Mario mushroom. When the player collides with my debuff, the player's thrusters are deactivated for about 2.5 seconds, turning the thruster bar purple to indicate they are still poisoned and the thrusters are down. I then worked on implementing a new enemy movement system, which incorporates a lot of random variables in order to make sure the enemy stays unpredictable. After finishing the movement, I went on to start incorporating a new enemy. This was far more time consuming than expected. Mostly because I started diving deep in my head as to what would be an interesting new enemy.
I didn’t quite finish the full implementation of my new enemy because I ran into some problems regarding adding the instantiation into my original enemy script. Having different types of attacks for my enemies, I was trying to sort out a way to have the script recognize when to shoot a laser and when to use my new enemy ability. Anyway, after going into a brain loop I decided it would probably be easier to control a new enemy from an individual script. So that is currently what I am doing, making my new enemy script from the ground up. I think in the long run it will be much easier to monitor the different enemies this way as well as modify them. I’m excited to get this new enemy functioning properly and will show it off in tomorrow's post.
Some other really fun tools I picked up today are figuring out how to get animations into Unity. This is actually a pretty easy process and any little animation you find on google can easily be formatted to be used in Unity. It just requires using a gif splitter. A very simple process that breaks the animation you find into sprite frames which can then be imported and used as an animation.
My goals for tomorrow are to get at least 4–5 core programming challenges completed. The ones I am looking at focusing on are, the Spawn Wave System, Balanced Spawning, enemy shields, and for the last two I am undecided so far. A bit ambitious but I think it should be doable.
