Day 8 & 9- The halfway mark

 Finished part 26 nothing major to report, sometimes I think I see an error with the match making but it disappears so quickly I`m not sure if its real or not. I think I need to add a delay before the refill so the destruction animation can clear.

Getting an error on part 28 - I must have something referenced wrong (will look into it later.)

FOUND my error. I didn`t copy the video precisely when I started, so I was running into a missing class reference error. It was looking for BackgroundTile, but I had labled the script BoardTile1. After fixing it things seem fine.

But things were not fine, as this lead down a stream of errors that I had to fix one at a time resulting in me re-watching part 28 for the better part of an hour. 

I have completed video 30 out of 64, so I`m over the halfway mark!

Unfortunately I`ve ran into issues in the deadlocking parameters. Sometimes it is deadlocked but doesn`t show it. However, since the next video uses this to detect and give players hints, I think i will complete that before diving back to debug. 

Got some bonus work done staying up last night too. So feeling good. Well on track and every bonus day I can rack up is more time to refine and redesign!

While I don`t mind the shuffle currently, I would like to add some sort of animation, a wave crashing, a whirlpool, something.

Day 7 - Simplify and clean

Went through several videos today and things are progressing well. Have functional bombs and color bombs, even code to make them! Still getting a weird row/column bomb issue where it creates two, also a few times more are disappearing than I intend. Some things aren't creating correctly, but those may clean up as I go along. I do have a good idea of how I might be able to clean up my column/row bomb issue too.

Speaking of cleaning up, the video cleaned up the code and when it did my random column issue disappeared. I think I saw a place I had an 'i' instead of a 'j'. Why we cannot use less similar letter I don't know, but it's gone now.

I am learning more and more. I can name things in Unity and they don't have to directly align with the scripts. I did this with the area bomb, I called it adjacent bomb in the script and just bomb in the unity.

Unfortunately I discovered there is over 60 videos, not the 58 lessons, this is due to some two part videos and cleanups that add more to watch, still on track but less ahead than I hoped.

Finished part 23, getting close to half-way!

Day 6 - The blahs have invaded - off target bombing

Was a rough go through the bomb making process. Something isn`t right in my vertical columns exploding. It works, but its progressively off target to the right, once it is so far to the right it is no longer on the screen it errors out.

 

Bad week in general, hard to focus, feeling tired and run down. 

I`m hoping some of these cleaning up videos will allow me to find my way. 

Made it part way through video 20.

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.