Sacrificing Fun Now for Success Later

     Back in 12th grade I made a promise to myself. A promise to spend my college years working hard on becoming the best game developer I possibly can. One capable of bringing all of my visions to life and living comfortably. One that never has to worry about running out of money in the bank every month or dread going into work every morning.

    Back then it seemed easy enough. I expected to be surrounded by other college game developers doing the same. I had no plans of having a girlfriend either but (thankfully) fate threw me a curveball. Lately the thought of just how hard I'm working compared to my peers has been occupying my mind for a moment I questioned if I was doing the right thing...

Next Game: Blending Genres

     I tried looking up games similar to the concept I had  for the RPG I'm making after DragCore, and I can't find anything that matches what I had in mind. Some come close but just don't play the way I'm imagining. I can hardly describe it to myself accurately. In basic terms I want an action RPG with top-down shooter combat, spell combination mechanics, Zedla style dungeons, Golden Sun style overworld, randomly generating battlefields, adaptive enemy difficulty, and  an entertaining story. I want to make a game I'd be excited to play. One that hits a niche and hits it hard.

     Ideas of how to make this idea work dance around in my head and I tried looking up examples to fill in missing blanks and make sense of the idea. By the looks of things I seem to be innovating. And that thought excites me a lot. I really want to get started with this thing but I need to get DragCore done first. I'm begging for the forces at work to let me finish by next Monday at the latest. If I encounter another setback I think I might die.

    

Fixing Audio With Audacity

     Audacity is a free program I use to edit music for my games. I'm slowly beginning to master it but I really only use a few of it's features to edit the open source music and sound effects I find. I like the Effect menu's Amplify, Change Pitch, Reverse, Change Speed, and Change Tempo features the most. I also tried recording my voice for videos here once but the quality was awful so I decided to use text instead.

     As far as lessons go I learned how much amplitude and dB effect the final sound and I've made a habit of maximizing the volume before exporting the files and using them in Unity. I still haven't mastered making songs loop nicely. It's always a noticeable skip and me messing with it usually ends up with the song sounding worse. I'm planning on teaming up with a friend for music in my next game so hopefully this won't be a problem anymore.

     Another lesson in efficiency was making audio playing game objects load when they're needed. Loading every sound effect and song could make the initial load time take forever and some scenes should have their own files for things they need. All this knowledge will make my future games all the better.

Last Minute Errors

     Of course it had to come back. Like a vengeful ghost in the form of computer code, the dreaded Internal Compiler Error of Unity has com back to torment me. I turned on my Firewall for just a moment after having issues with a file converter I downloaded and removed. Being silly me I forgot to turn it off before opening Unity. Now even though it's off Unity won't run any projects. I tried to recreate how to fix the problem yesterday, but I may just try uninstalling Unity and downloading it again. This annoyance delayed DragCore another day.

     So once I figure this mess out, I'll only have to implement Game Center and test everything one last time and finally submit. I'm really sick of pushing the deadline back, but it's all part of the learning process I suppose.