December Update

• December 18, 2018
• adrien
• DEVELOPMENT
• 5 Comments

I tried to post something every month, and as you can see, I failed.

PART-TIME PROJECT:
This is a good opportunity to write about the difficulty of working on something on the side: it’s really hard!
I have a day job, which is taking a lot of my energy right now, a long commuting time and all the things you have to do in real life and outside of work.
At the end, there’s not a lot of time left to focus on a complex project. It’s also a balancing act, between the frustration of not making progress during the week-ends and the fact that you want to spend time with your girlfriend, your friends, have some rest, watch a movie…. The last 2 or 3 months, my job and commuting took too much place in my life.

I managed to do some work though, but it was also frustrating: all the HUD/start menu/menu editors, which I thought were completed, had really deep and unexpected  issues. I found that the previews were not correct most of the time. It was also crashing sometimes, depending of what assets or what settings were used….
I corrected all the issues but it took a really long time and I had to rewrite a lot of the code. Furthermore, working on a complex issue in 30mn chunks was not effective at all. At the end I managed to make everything work as expected, and to be honest, I’m really relieved :)
This kind of issue is happening a lot with this kind of work, in an editor where everything is interrelated, changing something will cause unexpected issues somewhere else. And even worst, most of the time I’m aware of the issues only weeks or even months later when I test something else.
Sometimes it’s quite discouraging: when a lot of things breaks at the same time, you can be in a state of mind where you feels that the more you work, the more you have to work. Without making any progress…

Ok, it’s the “Depressing End of Year Post”, but all this is behind me now.
I mean, it’s almost Christmas!!!

So, moving on.

WHAT WE ALSO DID:
Apart from the usual debug and polish, I finished the modifications on the weapon workflow and editor.
I also completed the explosion editor reboot and corrected the controls editor, where you can modify the keyboard and joypad keys and buttons.

WHAT WE ARE DOING NOW:
-We are testing the last editor panels and correcting some issues with the UI
-I’m making sure that there are consistent minimum and maximum values for everything
-I’m correcting the tutorials

WHAT WE WILL DO UNTIL THE END OF THE YEAR:
-I’m going to add the 2 last in-game tutorials: weapons and triggers
-I still have some editor corrections in my to-do list
-I’m going to make the list of every features of the SHMUP Creator in order to make progress on the documentation
-I’m going to work on the SHMUP Creator during the holidays

MY NEW YEAR RESOLUTIONS:
– To at last go back to the 2D sample games and the 2D sprites assets creation
– To answer the question: “can we target a real beta release for April???”

Stay tuned :)

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