Thanks to Mary helping me with a filebase dll issue, I was finally able to do a Web GL build for my game . I was finally able to see the finish line. Then I got the enemy fire section…and boy oh boy did I completely underestimate the amount of work involved. And the bugs that would ensue. I was stuck from googling, slack threads and reasoning for a while. I decided to break up the challenge review and see if I could guess each step before it was mentioned. I’m soooooooooo glad I did that! The only thing I got correct is that the laser prefabs would be used and the direction would change. If I would have tried to figure it all out on my own, I really think it would have taken me way more amount of time than I already spent on it (several hours going through all the motions). Sometimes with learning coding, I really wonder how people do in real life on their own. It’s been a three steps forward, three steps back kind of deal in learning this. Perhaps, that’s the lesson in itself though- at least it’s seeming to be this way. There’s “accidental” learned information along the way. I’m sure I’ll look back at this in a year and laugh at dramatic I’m being right now😂.
For some reason, my game had a lot of bugs today. I think it might have been due to me not clicking “Apply All” to some prefabs perhaps, or maybe some bugs in my unity install. For some reason, my game objects kept disappearing and duplicating on their own. I think I’ll need to give my computer a check. Before I realized that this issue wasn’t related to my code (which I discovered after closing, then opening Unity and finding everything working fine), I tried to reset some of my game objects- HUGE mistake! Thankfully I just ended up undo-ing everything to reset it. I’ve come to one bug that through trying to debug, I’ve probably created- my enemy lasers disappear after they instantiate.
I used debug.break to see if they were even instantiating in the first place, as they been fine before (they just weren’t damaging my player- different bug). Turns out they were instantiating- just disappearing for some reason. They weren’t traveling up either. It seemed that they were clearly just appearing, then disappearing. I looked at the MoveDown() method code and my if statements to see if anything went awry. I kept scanning and scanning, “ctrl + f” short keying, spell checking and rewatching the challenge review. After an hour of scanning and scanning- BINGO! There it was: I typed the wrong operator. This wouldn’t show on any spell check or what not, because it was correct code syntax- just not correct code. As you can see, I set my if statement incorrectly. In my MoveDown() method, I needed y < -8f, not y > -8f (i.e. exploding just after instantiation.
Thus, I tried and you know what this caused? Me to finally finish my game 😁.
Even though the double laser is doing double damage to my player, it’s not a thing that I want to change. I agree with the module logic that each laser gives one zing of damage- hence why the player only shoots one laser by default.
For the last section, I just had to Google how to use the escape key to get out of the game. Thankfully, this was quick. And there you have it- the next page was a screen with instructions on how to submit. I signed up for an account with GitHub and downloaded Git, but to honest, I don’t think from what’s being written on Slack and how it’s not apart of the internship for beginners, that it’s something I will stay up all night for….Git seems like it’s going to take way more time than I have time for in this internship, let alone tonight. Will definitely be a “weekend/off-the-clock” thing to learn for my professional development. Since beginners aren’t doing Git, however, I’m not sure how to submit my game? I will ask my lead in our AM meeting tomorrow.
In the mean time, I would like to take the time to thank my GameDevHQ teammates/leads and random anonymous people on Google and Unity’s website that have helped- without which, who knows how long this would have taken. Funny how I thought it be more an introvert field😂🤣😅.Coding really does use community. But perhaps that’s the lesson in this coding lesson. You watch, you learn. You try, learn. You Google, you learn. You ask, you learn. You help, You learn. You just learn. You just do it.
Now let’s see if anything else pops up tomorrow😂. Is it ever really over?🤔
Stay well friends,
Kristin
