One of my top priorities has been developing my debugging skills- from my time coding (and I hear this through the grapevine as well), debugging is highly useful skill. Google is a huge part, but many times, I’ve Googled, and I just can’t see what’s wrong with what I’ve written. Today, I had a chance to put this into practice. Thankfully, today (11/20/20), in addition to me having to debug some things- for example, me adding a simple “s” into the word “canvas” was enough to make my enemy ships not destroy themselves anymore, during a UI score challenge in the 2D module. I wanted to see where the problem was- why wasn’t the function being called? I decided to see what would happen if I attached a debug.Log message to my script to at least see if my enemy was being recognized as colliding with the player ship
When I ran my game, I didn’t see my debug.Log message and my problem was also not fixed as well. This is a perfect example of how I make the decision to ask for help. I always want to try to figure it out on my own, but it’s at points similar to this, were I need help- because moving ahead to the challenge review isn’t going to solve my problem. After sending Joanne (Dan was on another call) some screenshots of my code, she reminded me to remember the logic of what I wrote. First, destroy object. Second print string (show the enemy destroyed message). If it goes in that order, and it does, why would the console print a message if there’s no enemy…it’s a logical fallacy. It’s like telling someone to say “Hurray!” after you say “Hip Hip!”, but you’ve gone back in time and deleted yourself before they could see that you’ve said Hip Hip!…it literally cannot happen because the line is affixed to the destroy method... once the enemy was destroyed, it no longer exists to even reference in the first place. It’s illogical.
Thankfully, all I had to do was move my debug.Log script. Interestingly enough at that moment, I was able to realize the typo that gave me the problem in the first place, so I then abandoned my plight of debugging in the interest of time 😂.
Today was definitely a day of typos- I think that burning the candle at both ends started to show it’s results, as many of my errors today have been caused by simple typos. The afternoon meetings today was a nice break to be able to really absorb, recall and think about what I have been learning. The funny thing is that things always click when I least expect them. Walking into those meetings, I was scared I wouldn’t remember a thing. And then it happened. I was recalling info left and right in my mind. Turns out- I have been absorbing this stuff the whole time 😮😁. The afternoon meeting also reinforced some data structures for me: 1) lists of options are arrays, 2) check boxes are booleans, 3)Words are strings. Also, it reinforced, to watch and learn when it comes to the Visual Studio hints when writing code- it a preventative measure that cuts down on potential bugs later on. Most importantly, the only thing you absolutely should copy and paste is your error messages into Google- chances are if you’re having an error message, you’re not the first. It’s so funny…sure, I knew this, but it didn’t sink in until he said it today for some reason😂.
This brings me to an interesting point to blog for you admin guys following along: what does it look like when Kristin the Developer tries to figure something out herself before looking at the Challenge Reviews? Let me walk you through a sample process today. First, I’m gonna Google my issue: how to make Game Over text blink on and off. Since I can’t think of a program feature I’ve learned thus far to recall, I decide to type my question into Google search.
Next, I choose the result that looks the most relevant- blinking text wasn’t very clear, so I quickly look at the second option listed. Bingo!
Then, I write in Visual Studio. Then, I run the game in Unity to test the code to what happens.
Well…that didn’t work out, but at least I tried 🙂. Now, that I attempted the challenge, I allow myself to look at the Challenge Review.
My goal is to really understand what I’m doing, I always put in an honest effort to figure out all challenges before asking for help, rather than just skipping ahead to the challenge reviews on the modules. To me, it seems exactly like copying and pasting code- you’re just going through the motions and not thinking about what you’re doing. I have been putting less time into really figuring out the challenges due to the limited time I initially had on this internship. I had to end up putting in a lot of hours in my off time to watching and re-watching modules and re-examining code so that I could maximize time I could utilize the hours that I knew I would definitely have access to people working who could help answer my issues (while also trying to get as much sleep as possible). Due to this, I’m so thankful that this program was determined to be successful and as an Oahu intern, this means this program is up for funding extension through the end of December! Yay! Why is this important if I have lifetime access to GameDevHQ, you ask? Part of the answer is time, but the most important part is money. Lifetime access is wonderful, don’t get me wrong- but we all need to pay the bills at the end of the day. Coding takes time to learn, and if you have to work a different job, I think it would significantly slow your progress, and contributes to burnout- of which the coding industry tends to have a high rate…Taking yet another potentially employable person away from the Hawaii Tech industry. Although I really don’t see why anyone would give up an opportunity like this in such an interesting field, let’s not set ourselves up for failure…or create problems we don’t need (or have to have) in the future. If we build our foundation right the first time, we don’t have to risk it in the future.
I want to finish this 2D module by next Monday, so I will be working on it this weekend and submitting my project by 8am Monday morning. I will achieve this.
Stay well friends,
Kristin
