Day 59: 2 April 2013

RB Whitaker 3 Apr 2013 2 Comments

First thing’s first. A quick explanation of what happened over the last few days. Basically, I wasn’t posting because I’m a human, and life happens.

If I’m not mistaken, last Wednesday was the last day that I posted before my little break.

On Thursday, I had a doctor’s appointment, an hour drive away from work. And you know how doctors are. If your appointment is at 4, they don’t see you until 4:30. So it took up about three hours of my time in the middle of my work day. The good news is, I’m healthy! But then I had to turn around and head back to work. I was there on Thursday night until about 22:30 or 23:00. By the time that was over, I was actually pretty exhausted.

The other thing that’s had a big effect in the later part of last week, and now this week too, is work has gotten quite busy. I’ve been working on this new release for our program for nearly a year. It’s absolutely baffling how trivial the changes seem like they should be, but it just takes that long to make the change. We’re finally just about ready to make our next release of our software, and that means a lot of long hours on most days.

But what are you going to do? It’s life. It’s a part of being a software developer.

So work has been taking up a larger than usual share of my time lately too.

Then my amazing wife (I know you’re reading this…) goes and gets sick. Contrary to popular belief, I really didn’t spend that much time taking care of her. She mostly just took it easy. I ran to the store a couple of times. That’s about it.

It was a holiday weekend (Easter) and I spent time with family. It was fun, but by the time it was over, it seemed like there was no time left for programming games.

That was disappointing. I had high hopes for the weekend.

I’ve said this a dozen times now, though. If you’ve already got a full time job, there’s a limit to how much you’re going to be able to do. You’re still you, you still have a life, and there’s other things that just happen some times. Just plan on it.

Like I said yesterday, it’s kind of a boring explanation why. Sorry to disappoint. 😀

Anyway, this evening I’ve been cranking away on my game. My primary focus has been on allowing the player to select individual parts (especially individual guns) and tell them what other parts to attack. You can now concentrate fire on a single enemy gun, or a single enemy engine!

Of course, nothing takes damage yet, so… what a lot of good that will do you…

There was also a lot of little bits of cleanup. I added logging to the initialization part, where I know some people have had issues. If you’re still having trouble, look in the directory where the .exe file is for a log.txt file. Email that to me and we’ll see where we can go from there.

I also made a change to the way the shells/missiles/whatever are drawn to look a little nicer. They still have a little ways to go, but they’re looking better and better.

And of course, most importantly, new daily build: http://rbwhitaker.wikidot.com/local–files/sprint-review/100XP-Daily.ccgame

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