Worked far too late

I had plans for what I wanted to get sorted today and a time frame for them, it is safe to say that everything went out of the window as usual as things didn't want to work and spent far too long trying to get them to work and never understanding why they didn't fork in the first place.

I had a couple of things on my list for working on and doing today these were, player animation (basically firing), Bomb flash's when hit before the explosion and player Ammo animations to show visually how much ammo they currently have. Not much considering I had a full night after work to play around and get things done and working, or so I thought.

To start with I wanted to get the bomb flash working and I had seen a tutorial online, a different one from the 4 I had already tried but this one was a video so it should have been easier to follow. I followed the steps and... nothing. no errors but no flash. I then spent the next 20 minutes trying to work out what had gone wrong, and finally discovered that because I had programmed it properly (a slightly different step than the video but the way the guy said to do it) it wasn't working. When I did the dirty hack way he did in the video, it worked. But it happened so quickly you weren't seeing it, I only knew it was working as I applied it to the creation of the object so the whole time it had the tint to it. I then had to create a co-routine and adapt some of the code, then tweak the timing of the co-routine to get this working the way I wanted. All good except I wanted to fix something that had been bothering me since I had put in the explosion animation, the face that it looks offset when it is called. The animation plays at the bottom of the bomb and it looks off visually, so I treid a couple of things to fix this but all failed. Then I hit on the idea that seeing as the bomb was no longer moving as it was in it's explode phase, when I start the explode animation just before that I would shift the x position of the game object (I had been trying to move the animation/sprite). Doing this allowed me to jump the sprite up the screen enough for it to sit roughly just below the middle of the bomb and now with the flash before the explosion it looks visually much better and correct. So these very simple couple of things in the end took up about 2 hours of my time to get working instead of the 30-40 mins I thought they were going to, but at least I now know for next time.

Next on the list was player ammo display animations. I had thought that the best way to achieve this was via animations but I was wrong, it turns out after spending a fair bit of time creating and trying to sort animations and set up a controller 3 or 4 times for these animations that there was a much simpler way to do this. After spending over an hour on this I hit upon the idea that I did not in fact have to animate between the ammo amount because essentially these were just static images. So in the game object for the ammo I set a few public variables for each of the images, then based on the amount of ammo the player has I just swap what sprite is being displayed, no need for animation. This actually works well, really wish I had just done it this way in the first place.

Last on the list was the player firing animation which I gave up on twice, it still is not implemented the way I want and will be going back to this when I have time to properly animate the barrel firing. I had created a set of sprites moving the barrel down and back up to simulate the firing motion, but when I applied the animation it went a off and by the looks of it its y position was all over the place. I could not for the life of me work out what was going wrong and after over an hour of creating and deleting animations and testing nothing seemed to want to work so I gave up, then for some reason i checked the sprite sheet. Everything seemed ok, but through a bit of fate or a mistake I clicked on a different part of the sheet by mistake and realised that you have to set the main point of each of the sprites and setting the first does not duplicate for the rest. I ended up just applying one of the sprites rather than the animation for the moment as I want to do a proper animation for the firing sequence.

By this time I should have given up for the night but I then went on to change the sprite for the player bullet to the final one (still need to look into doing a bullet trail) I also then added the image for the rest of the player ( the static part that does not move). Not content with all of that I then went on to add in 3 more different explosion animations and then re-worked the bomb animation tracker to include these and then re-wrote and added in some new code to the bomb so that when it gets hit, it randomly selects an explosion out of the 3. This means it all looks/works better rather than the same explosion happening constantly. I may add in a few more just to add more variety.

Not content with all of that work, I then went ahead and added in the top bar image to split up the display and then implemented the final new energy bar. This caused some issues as it works in a totally different way to the current test one I created. This meant that I had to rework the test code, which now that I have done it was simple but my first 5 attempts did not work even though it was in retrospect quite easy to fix. I think because it was so late at night and I was tired my brain just did not want to think logically how to do it.

So I managed to tick a lot of work of my list but there is still plenty more to go, the first things that spring to mind are:

Re-working some of the bomb code, to now randomly select an x starting point

Also change bomb code to re work the respawn to add in more variety

Screen intro and set up (countdown before starting)

Implement difficulty level (bomb speed increase, bomb size decrease, amount of bombs increase to max 6)

player fire animation rework

sound effects for everything

fix ui text not following camera movements

there are other things but at the moment these are the ones that come instantly to mind