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!

Day 13 - The heat is on!

     So fun fact, I don`t do well in the heat. I moved to Texas last year and do not enjoy anything above 75 F. This week the fan for the AC broke. They say it won`t be fixed for a week while they order parts. I work well under pressure, I do not work well when hot and sweaty. It's my 13th day... are you superstitious?

    Needless to say things did not go swimmingly. Working on the UI to be able to set goals and keep track of them, first thing I run into is an issue when I wanted to scale differently, had to fiddle with the spacing a lot of make it look good on my screen, the opening screen was fine, but the rest was a mess. Finally got all of it down and then tried to play a few rounds, things didn't count correctly. It would count 2 or 3 and stop, or count all of one but none of another. The more I played the less responsive it seemed. I thought it had something to do with tags again. Hot, sweaty and frustrated after an hour and a half of chasing my tail I decided to cool off and call it a day. Let my buddy Russ (who is actually trained in this) have a look at it, apparently he was having his own issues and decided to give his a break. 

    Today I get a message he found the issue, apparently it was because I had the instructions inside of the wrong set of brackets. So simple, yet so annoying.

    Here's the progress so far! Note the goals opening page and the TINY goals on the bottom right:

    Will for sure need to have those goals larger and more prominent. But for now I feel good that I was able to get the help I needed and can continue on track. The next set of videos are long, each 30-40 minutes and several with multiple parts. Then it looks like it shortens up a bit, I`m in the meat of it now for sure. Video 44 on the way!

Day 12+ Sounds, Lights, Action (90% of the work left to do)

 Part way through video 43. Creating the level goals. Its a two-parter that was being a pain in the ass. I wanted a vertical layout, the video only did horizontal. Gotta keep in mind that this is more for my learning than my final project. 

It now plays music when it starts and makes bubble pop noises when matches are made! 

Personal note; get better videos!

I know I`m late posting. I spent many hours fighting my work, checking the codes, consulting with colleagues. They said it should work to change the layout. It should be as simple as changing from vertical to horizontal. I should know how to spell VERTICAL correctly. 

To Do:

Change to horizontal layout - Find better pictures for goals - Pirate Coins?

Add lots of sounds - Bomb explosions, shuffles, 

Modify sounds and destroy so they go in series instead of instantly. This might be very tricky as it may require me to rewrite how the code identifies dots to be destroyed. HOWEVER I did note that back in that section there was an option to have Unity do the work for destroying, which might be better in the long run as I want the destruction to have animations.

Day 11 - Mistagged-Mistakes!

Finished video 36 - Thought I would spend forever but actually got several videos done.

Bug report - Found my issue! The grey boot was mis-tagged as seaweed dot! After fixing that the issue has not reoccurred. However a new one has popped up in the chaining. Since everything is waiting on mouse click and not on when the last 'move' status this has lead to a problem with the hint checking before everything has settled. 

Hint way too fast and off target after combo. - Solution - Change the hint check to check for 'move' status instead of mouse click.

***Will post to the hint video section***  

This may be complicated as it would no longer reset when I click, which honestly, if its working how it should, will never be an issue.

Bomb triggering. Right now the adjacent bomb doesn`t trigger, and the bombs do not combine. That might require some deeper coding though I saw someone post a set that I might be able to follow in video 35.

Current state of the game:

Matches = Good

Hint = Flawed

Deadlock = Good

Feel = Still lacks some of the pizaaz I`m shooting for. Will have to look at speeds and sprites.

Definitely need to pretty things up, but that's all for post. I may not even use the same stuff so I won`t bother with prettiness now.

I`m starting to understand how things are done, though the exact parsing still eludes me.