The Path of the Game Dev — Day 11

Saving progress…

— —

Got deep in the weeds today. Since I knew I had already completed some of the less coding intensive challenges for Phase 2, I started working on an enemy wave system and a homing projectile.

The wave system works by incrementing the wave number after a specified cool down period and spawning a number of enemies equal to the wave number. The way I did this was, of course, through coroutines! Previously the bane of my existence in the C# survival guide and now my best friend. I did go back to the guide to refresh my memory on some of the ins and outs of coroutines (like how to avoid infinite loops that crash Unity).

I still have to work on a UI element that notifies the player of which wave they are on and updates as the game progresses.

Another requirement I started working on today was the homing missile. I expected it to be a real challenge — when I started the internship, a lot of the other interns had written in our Slack channel asking for help. This one was definitely a stumper. And being someone who didn’t get very far in math I thought it would be near impossible.

I stuck with it and tried my best. Now the homing projectiles have basic movement but there are still some kinks to iron out… like when they stop tracking the enemy and instead drop off to the bottom of the screen. Hm, gotta work on their movement.

Lastly, we had a team meeting today. This time we went over animations in 3D — so not very useful at the moment, but I’ll check out the recording again when I get there.

Biggest takeaways from the day: Sometimes the only thing you can do is stick with it. No matter how much you don’t understand, someone else was in your same position and figured it out.

— —

Progress saved!