Day 5–10/28/20
My game is starting to get polished up. Today I worked on completing the power-ups and now have all three power-ups, the triple-shot, the shield, and the speed boost. On top of that my UI for the game now has a displayable life counter, score counter, and a main menu.
Getting into the UI has been a little bit of a whirlwind to say the least. I’d say one of the worst things I am at, I had to do a lot of today, which is referencing. I definitely feel as if I have gotten a better grasp of it but I still would like a lot more reps within that area. I’d like to get to the point where I am comfortably able to logically speak myself through the situation and know what tools and functions I need to utilize. Right now I feel like I'm still very much at the point of just slowly piecing things together to where they are starting to make sense but not completely.
Other than feeling like my head was in a vortex, I didn’t run into too many problems. The one problem I did run into today had to do with setting up the animations for my game. I had accidentally used the shield power-up animation for the shield on my player animation and when I went to play the game and collected the shield power-up my space ship now looked like a flickering bug with “Shield” written across in big text. I was caught off guard and realized what I had done and figured it would be an easy fix just need to readjust the animations and boom back to the program. Unfortunately, it did not quite go this way, and I spent probably half an hour trying to figure out what the hell I did to my animations. Before I knew it I had everything blinking with the shield animation. Anyways after a lot of attempts at undoing, deleting, and recreating the animations, nothing seemed to work. Finally, I stumbled across the layer tab in the animator window to see several different versions of the shield power-up created in my various object animator windows. I deleted all the relations with the shield power-up and with a sigh of relief was back on to progressing through the program.
A couple of interesting things I learned today are what exactly quaternions are (Thanks Austin), and the use of switch statements. For anyone interested a quaternion is basically used to control the rotation of an object within unity, and I believe a Quaternion.identity just sets the object to its default rotation.
Switch statements are very useful efficient ways of basically doing if statements, and are fairly easy to understand the logic behind them. Basically, create some variable you can store things such as user input or numbers into, and then you can run that through the switch statement. The switch statement will then handle that info basically as an if statement would but with far less coding and a much cleaner appearance. This is definitely a tool I am going to try to utilize more often.
