Random Learnings

Next week, the Month of Games begins.

Almost every project is ready - two are uploaded and waiting for me to hit publish, one needs me to commit some changes (but not yet, otherwise it will break my test setup), and the fourth needs a couple of days to kick it over the finish line. It was so tempting on Wednesday night to just say fuck it and release what's ready, but that would spoil the whole idea.

As for what happens after that, we shall see. I think I'm committed to something. But it's pretty clear by now that I will have probably changed my mind multiple times by the end of next month. Anyway, here is what I have learned over the past few months.

  • I never want to attempt to write AI again
    • This is very problematic because pretty much every idea I have involves getting other characters to move, including the thing I am planning to work on next
  • I never want to do maths again
    • Scaling sprites? Easy. Doing the mental gymnastics to work out what to set the scale at? dannydevitonope.gif
  • Working from 9am-1pm then having a nap and doing work on another project in the evening when I feel like it is great
    • Instead of pushing for 4 day working weeks, let's push for 4 hour working days
      • 3 hour working days once a week also works if you want to watch the latest episode of a show on Disney+ before getting started
  • Always use a backslash even if a forward slash works
    • Two weeks it took me to figure out that was the cause of my Android builds throwing a content not found exception
  • Typescript is pointless
    • At least for what I want to do - it was much easier to just do everything in vanilla JavaScript
  • Skill based matchmaking in Fall Guys is not fun
    • I barely remember when I used to be able to get past the first round in Solo
    • This isn't really relevant to game-dev, but I've played Fall Guys everyday since it became free
  • Sylvester Stallone wrote Rocky
    • I thought he was just the star
    • This is relevant to one of the games I made
  • The Tories are cunts
    • Already knew that, but it's always worth repeating
  • Coding for Unity on a Macbook is awful
    • Even with extensions, VS Code is incapable of telling me what methods are available to me
    • Proper Visual Studio can tell me what methods are there, but it says that my folders are all empty and that I have no code files
    • I didn't try XCode because I assumed that'd be useless, and it's always in a state of trying to update to the latest version so I wouldn't be able to open it anyway
  • Google Play does not email you when they approve your app like they say they will
    • There are very quick about emailing if you accidentally provide an incorrect URL for a privacy policy though
      • It's stupid having to provide one anyway when you have checked the field that indicates that you are not collecting any personal information
  • When not using Jira, setting small targets is a good way to get stuff done
    • Example: By 11am, the pause menu should be functional; by 12pm, the options menu should be functional
  • Changing scope should always be considered
    • I had a number I wanted to hit, but it became clear I was going to get nowhere near that number so dropped it to something that seemed more feasible
There's other stuff I suppose, but I can't remember right now.

Final bit of teasing for next month - all games will be playable on PC. Three will be playable on Android. One will be playable on iOS. And to set expectations - they are all quite short, but all have replay value.

Also to note - two of the Android games have ads. It's a weird thing to do considering I avoid ads as much as possible, but was an experiment to see how difficult it was to implement that potentially results in generating enough money to buy a pack of supermarket brand biscuits. Plus apparently Google owe me £6 from a previous app I made that had ads, and they won't pay out until it hits something like £60.

Let's hope I remember to click publish by 12pm this time next week.

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