Day8, Slow Progression
It’s the 8th day since I’ve engaged in the GameDevHQ Program. Lot has changed since the beginning. From the thought that I can’t possibly pull this off, my mind started being more confident and think of the ways things “can” happen. I did have some interest in programming and the desire to make something out of nothing before, but now slowly and surely, they are becoming a possibility.
Today’s implementation was the last of the Phase I: Framework. The strengthened Shield system. Of course, the player starts out with the regular 3 lives. For every shield pickups, the player gains a safety feature of a hit-free shield. As I was uploading this dev blog, I realized that I haven’t capped the shield number to 3. I went back and added the feature to restrict the additional gain of shield after the 3 pickups. The shield is also safe from the enemy && enemy’s lasers while thrusting.
..
else if (_isThrusterMode == false)
{
if (_isShieldActive == true)
{
..
if then the shield takes in the damage from the enemy and its lasers.
Scripts Edited are within: Player.cs, uiManager.cs
Sprites Added are: No_shield, One_shield, Two_shield, Three_shield
gameObject Added: Canvas>Shield_Display_img
Within our PM team_workshop, we reviewed getComponent. I feel more comfortable using this more, but am curious how efficient it’d be to constantly call another Object. Endless learning.
The challenges I had today, was myself. It wasn’t that I was being lazy. I was constantly reading up on features that could be added and how I would then implement it into my current game by inspecting its codes. I watched video tutorials and made notes to in which section I can use these. But it took some time until I could actually put myself into the mode of writing. Which had me ponder on how I would optimize the codes I wrote. I realized through coding from the past days that most of my codes are run through if function more than anything. I had a talk with my team leader if this is going to be okay. And he comforted me that this is what we know as of now. And we will learn something as we continue and in the later time, we would then know how to write it the other way; more efficient way.
Tomorrow is the beginning of Phase II: Core Programming. I have some notes on what I could add in and learn and inspect. Another day, another lesson learned.