2D Shooter Dev Diary - 2 MAY

After tracking the hours I put into this project, I realized that after I had run out of tasks to give myself I got discouraged and stopped working on it. I started coming up with a thousand ideas on what I should change the project into in order to breathe life into it when I realized that it was wrong to break off from the original idea because I was getting bored. Instead, I doubled down and started working on a GDD to solidify all rules of the game, as well as using a Trello and Changelog to keep everything organized.

With the new workflow established, things are moving a lot more clearly. Rather than staring at the game and feeling lost for direction, I was able to just go to my Trello checklist and pick a task I thought I could focus on. This week was dedicated to finishing up the GDD then implementing health pickups, invulnerability after taking damage, damage knockback, and load next level.

  I’m excited that as time goes by, I don’t need nearly as many tutorials and deep dives into forums and can mostly figure things out on my own at a surface level. My spaghetti code finally caught up to me when I wanted persistent health but couldn’t detach the code from the player. The player controller is almost all the coding in the game, from taking damage to entering new rooms, and therefore even the smallest hiccup screws the entire game up. Worse yet, rather than just creating a new health manager script, I hoped to be able to pour even MORE code into the player controller hoping it would solve my problem. After hours down the drain, I realized it was better to start from scratch, so I tried to reload to a previous version. That seemed to be fighting me, and I nearly broke my entire project! Fortunately, I got it figured out and finished a lot of important work. Coding is nearing an end and it's almost time to start level designing.

Overall, this has been a great week for the project, and even some of the finalized art assets have been going in!