Day 5 - Diverging thoughts

I`m up to video 16, or 15.1. Either way its 1/4 of the way there! Mr. Taft had a setback and had to re-code a lot of his work. While he insists this is fine, it looks different enough it may make following were he is in the code harder later. 

As I go along I am thinking about how I want my final product to differ from the example. So far my differences are:

Objects arrive and refill from the bottom - arriving isn`t hard, refilling is though, I`ll have to adjust how pieces move after being used.

Can move pieces while others are falling - Debating if I want to keep the slower one move at a time approach, or being able to move multiple pieces before the board is settled. This may require blocking moves incoming or making it a null space or something, not sure yet.

Gif effects - I have found some bubble pop sprites I need to replace the current option with.

Update destroy effect - Apparently there is a built in destroy effect for sprites that unity uses. Not sure which is better but I`ll stick with what I have so that if coding later references I`ll be able to find it.

I am noting a lot more inside of the code so I know what is what later. This will be important when I make the above changes.

Day 4 - Why developers are not paid by the hour

Up to video #12 in the series! I had a few bonus times where I spent more time playing catch-up to my imaginary line. Apparently I didn't need to as I blew through four videos this time.

My board looks about the same:



However now it does tricks! It can detect matches, remove those that detected as a match, slide those around, and then refill! I do want to see if I can switch things up in the next series which has things coming down from the top, I want them to bubble up from the bottom.

Things still go wonky if I go too fast for the board:



But there is a solution for that apparently a bit later. I do wonder if there's a solution that still allows for moves while things are sorting. In move counting games it wouldn`t matter as much as non-move counting games.

Lastly I discovered why developers aren`t paid by the hour. It seems most of their time is spent developing the code, finishing a working project and then returning to correct all of the bad code they wrote initially. The comments section and a good last portion of the videos seem to deal with consolidating and rewriting code to be more streamlined and less of a system hogging mess. I think I`ll just keep on this pace and worry about streamlining later.

This also lets me know just how valuable a good programmer is vs a bad one.

Day 3 - Why didn't I pay more attention in English!?

Long story short; I cannot recall getting higher than a B- in English courses in school. Mostly C's. All my friends were in AP English, when ever I couldn`t sneak in I would be king of the nicknamed "AP Stapling" course, aka remedial English.

Anyways that, now over a decade and a half later is biting me in the ass. Got through videos #3 and #4, but I was stuck on #3 forever. At first I thought it was because I was naming my variables a bit differently, originally I wanted to do this so I wouldn`t just be copying code, but maybe understanding how parts related. It worked creating a board, but when I got to making the game pieces, or their representative dots I kept getting errors. I thought it was because of my ad-libbing of the naming structure. Computers shouldn`t care if I call them dots, or circles, or balls, just as long as they match later references right!?

Correct!

What I did learn however was that C# and Unity are sticklers about capitalization and spelling. I had capitalized a GameObject reference, making the code think it was a value or something, rather than a empty location to be filled. I think. So I spent an hour and a half pouring over code, going back to prior episodes, screwing up my current code and project, then having to quickly redo much of the prior work to make it all sync correctly again. I was so frustrated I pinged Russ, but as it always go, found my error right then, so when he got back I had another issue.

This time it was with this line:



Its freaking out saying it doesn`t know what to do with Quaternion. I research and dig into it, spend another few minutes before I realize indentity isn`t a word.... it was supposed to be
identity. Who knew that spelling would be my Achilles heel in coding. Need to talk to them about spellcheckers....

I managed to fly through the next lesson and my project now can identify the direction between first and last mouse positions! Also learned that two years is enough to make Unity and C# not exactly the same as the video, so I`ll have to watch-out for that.



Thought I'd be disappointed with today's results, but with the last push I`m happy with the progress. Next is making the dots/circles/balls move and swap places!