Bug Hunt: Unicorn Training Treasure & Electric Gates

     Most of yesterday consisted of debugging as I tried to fix things that seemed to be working fine. The electric gate switching was failing to get rid of invisible walls because of how I haphazardly grouped the objects in the scene's hierarchy and some were even mislabeled as the opposite color. I had to go through each scene with electric gates and correct them.

    Once those were settled I tried to move to new things on the task list but ran into another bug that ate a few hours of the day. I wanted excess items to do nothing when picked out of chests. I wanted them to be placed back in chests originally, but with the mess I coded it'd create less bugs if I had it just say you have no room.

    For some reason it broke my TextMaster script after working on the previous 3 tests. All thanks to the way I use " @" as the line skipper. It was as if using two line skips was against the rules despite it not breaking anything moments ago. The problem was sloppily fixed by adding a random bunch of spaces and having the script cut them off for me when pushing the next word to the following page.

    I can breathe easy now that this nonsense is behind me. It's Columbus Day so my early class is cancelled for the day which will give me an extra hour of gamedev before going back to the grind. I want the dungeon selector done before Friday.

Unicorn Training: Enemy Behavior & Electric Gates

     Saturdays are my day off so I didn't get much done lately. What I was able to do after class on Friday was code how enemies behave in the overworld (basically don't shoot and only move horizontally instead of roam) and make certain electric gates alternate between yellow and blue automatically. It's Sunday now which is a day completely dedicated to gamedev so lot's of progress is sure to be made by bedtime. I want to be as close to the finish line as possible by the end of the upcoming 3-day weekend.

Status Report #59 (Prefabs Placed & Live Spriting Session)

     This week's distractions include Smash Bros, a school mini-carnival (free for students), and tons of incredibly frustrating homework. Despite it all I made tons of progress with Unicorn Training and have a world full of enemies and items! Next week is a 3-day weekend too, so I'll have tons of dev time then. I might even get everything but music done!

Look at this week in review below!

PCT GameDevs: Sprite Making Tutorial & Custom Text Boxes

I explained the difference between pixel art styles and different approaches to making your own.

     Every week something is presented at the PCT GameDevs meetings and this week I showed everyone the basics of sprite making and how I made the text boxes work in Unicorn Training. It's nothing I haven't show on this blog before but it was my first time explaining these things to a live audience. It was actually pretty fun to put together and I got some extra practice with my new draw on paper then scan in Paint technique by tracing over an astroknight doodle.

     The meetings still have awkward points as attendance goes down and I occasionally stumble over words when trying to explain my thought process. Although the club is meant for students to teach each other, I'm not much of a teacher myself but more of an example. I've been working on stuff alone since high school so I'm used to the speed of thought and my complex web of information when doing anything. Putting it all into English on a moment's notice can be hard.