Day 25 - And the waters rose!

 Feel a bit like Moses playing with water right now. Having a heck of a time messing with things to get the feel right but low and behold I am able to have the water move up, then back down as the player scores better! The method even has a bit of momentum!

So the water is working well, just needs fine tuning. 

Next will be updating the UI. My old work just doesn't cut it:

 

It's just unbecoming of what I wanted to do. No wood textures, background is wonky, cannons are shite, and its lacking in detail all around. 

So I will update it, adjust the UI, and make a new Base Level. 

Then the final stage will be making a missing board, having it updating and pulling missions from a randomized field! I think I will keep with a star mechanic for now. For publishing reasons it`ll work well.

As a side note; thank you to all whom gave support to my wife and I. She is still at a hospice facility where I spend most of my day. She's no closer to passing away but she's certainly not going to get better either. Will keep people updated on that, it may disrupt my ability to finish on time.

Right now I`m slating the end of January for a beta publish. 

Day 24 - Best laid plans

       Right now I`m at a bit of a stand still. The wife took a turn for the worse over the weekend. I had to drag her out of the bathroom before calling 911. She's basically paralyzed on the right side of her body, much of her left side and mental functions. Anything more complicated that yes or no answers is very hard for her to handle. Sometimes that's too much.

    I missed getting anything done today. However! I did realise I didn`t update from last week and there has been some noticeable progress:

I`m particularly proud of these artworks:

As you can see, I added my artwork. Added the water line and it animates. My first attempt at the water line was a nightmare, apparently using a version that was out with windows XP was not a solid choice!

I decided that spending days to fix it was a waste of effort and I spend $20 for some Unity stuff that will work for my project. Now I just need to figure out how to incorporate it into the design!

Day 22 & 23 - Tutorials done!!! (the easy part)

     I have finished the videos from Mister Taft Creates! Despite this success, there is MUCH left to do! Still this checks many of the boxes for my very first game. It has level selects, keeps scores, assigns stars, unlocks new levels and everything! 

    Now I have about two months to do a whole lot of uncharted work. I am apprehensive, daunted and pressed for time. Adding to this my wifes brain tumor (did I mention that before?) has gotten worse. She's about 7 to 8 years beyond the life expectancy of someone who had the size of tumor she did but this last year has been a significant amount of degrading condition for her. I don't know if she'll last the night, I don't know if she'll be fine for another decade. But back to the work, here's a list of things I need to do, and things I want to do:

Need: 

Fix scaling issue - The background scales, but the tiles don't. Need to fix that. According to Russ that's the Unity nightmare.

Water level game addition - Not much of a bildging game without water in the hold! Difficulty (Hard) There's little in the way of resources for this and I want it to be able to affect the board pieces. 

    Setting up the water itself I have some resources, how to make it change height or affect the speed board pieces move, not as sure. 

Bilging math - The bilge pump needs to move against the water level. This combines a score, a time and a water increase rate. In theory this should be easy. In practice I have no idea how all these variables will be able to tie together. It will also require much refinement and testing.

Voyage selector - Since levels are very different than voyages I need to make those adjustments. This includes making a random voyage generator including length, difficulty and payout.

Art rework - I have a lot of art I've created. I need to reskin a ton. I'm still lacking a bit of background art. I'll have to choose to their do without or do with less. This also includes the UI, the splash screens and when people activate bonus items and get combos.

Want: 

    Animations - I could spend months on this. Animations make a game after all. There are a ton of resources, but I don't know how many I'll be able to use. On that list- Animate the background. Ocean waves, birds and islands drifting by would be good, but that's more art, more work and I'm not sure how much I would get from it. Animations for game pieces would be a much better place to work at , those are where the eyes will be most the time anyways. I would like to not do six million animations for everything, I would like to use Unitys animation parts but that's a whole extra thing to learn. UI animations are also a bit of an eyesore right now. A bit of a mess to figure that out, though I already have something in the works.

    Sounds and music - This might be one of the easiest I can add. However I get the least returns from it. Most people play with the sound off, so investing my time lightly here.

Reward system - Just completing the voyage is fine, but everyone likes progress, and progression requires more than I have covered so far. Might be a bridge too far for a beta.

Create game map - This isn't necessary. I can get around it and simplify, but I really would love being able to sail and track progress on different islands.

Ship upgrades - Increase speeds, pumping, distance to travel, etc. Definitely want, might not get.

Power up purchases - Using in game rewards for purchasing power ups to use in games.

Make increasingly difficult levels - Might need testers for this.

    

   There is much to do. There is time to do it. Just gotta stay focused and have fun on this! Must remember the fun! 

Day 21 - Lost in the (sea)weed

    With the pain if last weeks issues behind me I looked forwards to getting some more features done. Really wanted the icing tutorial as it will be invaluable for the tentacles of the krackens! The videos went well except I didn't do the prep work and now my seaweeds are barnacles, my barnacles are crab swarms, and my crab swarms look crappy. That last one is unrelated, just been doing a lot of my own art and some art good and some aren't. I am having a blast getting back to my art too, the best part is I can make progress while I'm watching TV or bored at work or whatever. Even booted up my old tablet and am looking to find a good stylus. Here's some of the art so far:

    At some point I'll be redoing a lot of the art. Getting better at it, especially separating layers so I can do animations later too.

Day 20 - Setbacks with the scripts

😡😠😟😞😐😆😌  Well it was bound to happen. Having to go back a version as the last one really screwed things up. Watching part 50 (video 56) there were a lot of changes not only structurally but to the code itself. Something got messed up, making a single move clears the board, I was able to track down the issue with debug logs but that didn`t clear it up further.

So now I`m back to last weeks version and will run a test after each change to see what it was that caused the issue in the first place. Hopefully I can find it, and either avoid making the error again or change it to work. Really need a working game so that I can watch the next videos and get the most out of them. I haven`t been idle in this time however, I have been working hard on some ideas! 

The current puzzle pirates is just a simple pirate game, the titles and awards mean little. In my version titles come with the ability to make rules and edicts for other players, everything from setting taxes to awarding titles and even waging war on other companies and nations! Still fleshing out details but it should be fun. 

I also found that I like doing art again, found a simple art app and have been doodling away so I can better express what I want things to look like in a final project. Here's a sketch of what I`d like the game board to look like: 

UPDATE: An hour and a half redoing work and checking over each and every change with test cases and now everything is working. The only thing that I didn`t do was the second change as it caused things not to match at all on vertical moves.

Now it works....kinda just wished I`d left well enough alone but hey, its cleaner and less messy! Now onto some fun stuff!

Day 15-19 A week of progress!

 I took the whole week off for my birthday. Though I did not spend 18 hours a day working on the project I did spend about one to three hours each day making a lot of progress. I`m glad I did too! These videos are much more detailed and longer. I only completed four but there was much in those four. Starting from the first day:

Day 15 - Making different levels. This went well, it was pretty straight forwards, the only strange part was getting the levels to show up. I hope to figure out a faster way to create levels as well, having to individually list each part takes a lot of time I had hoped to spend on other tasks. There might be a way to do it in the main page then save it as a level. Will investigate later!

Day 16 - Level select - This was mostly in Unity. I had to create a lot of art assets as I wasn`t using the exact ones from the video. I think it will be fine but again, I need to make some better quality ones or buy some. I don`t like this low detail look, it doesn`t have the cool pixelated look, or maybe its a clash of different styles. Here was the result: 

    Day 17 - Coding level transitions - This one got to me. I kept running into issues both in unity and in coding. I was getting all sorts of null exceptions, had a modify my code. Keeping track of where things start at 0 and where things start at 1 gave me a headache. 

    Day 18-19 - Binary File - Finally starting to feel like a game! It can now create and save your progress. Apparently there is an unencrypted version called PlayerPerfs, but Mr. Taft prefers the more secure version. It doesn`t seem to effect much for loading time and having to do it later would be a bit of a pain. 

    I had a moment of elation while finishing up the first day! I had a problem where the code was not finding the player.dat file. I noticed that no-where in the code did it actually create a file, just tried to open and save one! Well I wrote my first bit of code and using a few references from code I had written earlier fixed the problem. Now, without help from anyone for the first time, I created a bit of code to check if there was player.dat, open it if it existed, or create it if it didn`t! In complete honesty, I found out later that if I just changed the code from open to create it would check anyways. BUT the accomplishment is still there. 

    Data now saves, your score updates and it even unlocks the next level! Not entirely sure where this will all fit into my larger plan but it's there! Video of selecting level, completing and unlocking next level below:

I`m losing a bit of ground having to do a lot of background work, editing pictures, downloading other assets. But I still think I`m on track. I`m on video 52 of 65. Just need to make sure I`m getting at-least one done a week! Going to eat through my contingency time I need to go back and make a bunch of changes so the game is closer to what I want to publish.

Till next week!

Day 14 - Dealing with the Perfection Demon

    Finished video 46 - That makes me almost at the 3/4 done with the videos. On course, though video 47 promises to be a long one.

    Had a bit of a panic attack this last week. Maybe its the heat and humidity, though they swear they`ll be here in the next two days the doors in my house have already swollen from the humidity to where some do not close well. I had apparently harmless mole removed from my ear Monday, though it had all the trademarks of cancerous, doc looked at it and said it was benign in a few seconds. Finished binge watching a good series and having that existential crisis that all great finales bring. I suppose crappy endings spare us that.

    Maybe it was because of the anxiety I feel when I imagine what I want this game to turn out as. Scratch that, its definite that. All just me doing it to myself. Always have lofty plans and ambitions but get disappointed when my grand plan doesn`t play out as I imagined. This is what I am literally doing this for, so I can just complete a project, get some experience and see what I can do and keep the Perfection Demon from ruining it. Deep breaths. 

    Finally finished the videos on goals and on end game conditions. Some notes:

- Need to change the 'levels' language to 'voyages'

- Need to create a speed gauge which will determine the length of the voyage

- Voyages will also have a timer value, arriving late will result in lesser rewards and promotions.

- You don`t loose when timer or on a move counter, just if you manage to sink. 

    I could go on, but that's enough for the moment. I mean all the art needs redoing (Damn you Perfection Demon!)

    Russ says he knows a video tutorial for a nice water effect, that`ll come in handy when I`m doing the bilge pumping. So many water animations. 

Anyways. Now the game recognizes when you win or loose and cuts to another screen when you do. Check it out:

Loss

Win!

I refuse to apologize for my choice of music.

    Fair weather and fine sailing me hearties!