First Full Weekday of Game Dev

Time Worked: 6 hours, 15 mins

This is my first full weekday of game dev. I have recently moved to part time at my job. They were gracious enough to allow me to become hourly and work 24 hours a week which is incredible. I mean I have never had such an amazing opportunity. I decided to do so because I really want to make this stuff happen, and as much as I enjoy working in my spare time, I know that I can do more. 

I was a little worried about my ability to focus but I barely even needed any caffeine today; I was just in the zone the whole day. This is fantastic. Of course I know this is the first day, and the first day of something new is always exciting. But I can tell that there is something to this. This is my dream coming true right now.

Not only that. But the results of the work I put in have been phenomenal. Today I did a lot, mostly focused on adapting the game to the correct camera size and updating various things related to the art perspective. One major leap I made was fully beginning the transition to 2D. I was already doing 2D clearly, but I was working with the same pathfinding and collision that EndSoldier used (which was 3D). I figured it wasn't a big deal and the player wouldn't notice. But there were enough issues that came up that I decided it was worth fully getting away from 3D. That's an entire dimension of calculations and memory usage etc., weird rotations and all that are completely unnnecessary.

So I picked up the A*PathfindingProject for navigation instead of Unity's NavMesh system, and it has been fantastic. I'm not sure what it is in all I did today that made the difference, but the game just feels way better. I think it's just that little bit of wonkiness removed improved things alot.

There's still a lot of cleanup to do, but I am so excited to do it. I seriously can barely pull myself away from this right now, but I know I need to go workout, gotta take care of the dogs, and gotta spend time with my lovely wife. But I am super super grateful and excited to be given this opportunity to do my very best, and I'm telling you, this is the year.

Here's a little screenshot (a bunch of stuff still isn't working right), but tomorrow I will post a GIF. GIFs are fun.