Well I was supposed to put up a devblog yesterday, and through a unique cocktail of procrastination and forgetfulness I didn’t get around to that. So here it is a day late.
Part of the reason is I wanted to get something more done before I posted anything. This has been a week of nibbles, little bits of work, of popping open my IDE and solving one small problem and then deciding fuck it I’m done. Partially this is good old fashioned laziness, a genuine desire to just fuck off and play video games or read or whatever instead of working on the game. Partially, as well, it’s because the programming that needed to be done to get this enemy type up and running was a bit logistically complex – problems that weren’t difficult per se, but that needed me to decide exactly how I wanted to handle them in the way least likely to break something or make something I want to do later more difficult.
I got all that stuff done, just not much else. I did take a little side trip and modify a function I created a while back to cyclically automate changing numbers a whole lot more powerful: I wanted to use it to create a constant rotation for certain thrown projectiles, but the way it was coded it only supported automating the values in different variations on a sine wave. I went ahead and replaced the sine wave with an arbitrary wave form, so that, for instance, I can have the rotation go from 0 to 360 degrees and then reset using a saw wave motion.
So at this point I have all the code and animations to make the entity work in place: What’s left is to test them and make sure they actually work. Then I start in on, uh, one of the things I mentioned having to do next last week.
Also, this week I’m going to be going on a trip — it remains to be seen whether those long train rides will let me get some productive work in on the game or whether the overall hubbub and distraction of travel will destroy my creative output, but, um, it will be something different for sure.