trashpandarx

[trashpandarx]

Devlog #3 6/5/24

Sorry for the very long absence 😔. However it wasn’t because of anything bad, I was working on the game and learning another technology alongside taking a few master’s level CS classes.

The lack of posts was mostly the fact that I’m not used to keeping records of this sort of thing, I actually have daily logs of some of the things I was doing for my own progress and keeping track of my ideas.

One of the last things I was working on was a UI tool for unity to help alleviate the pain of hand-coding a bunch of assets that should have a streamlined code-free creation process, that I want to avoid doing again… I did that for a class project and I hated it. Anyway I paused that progress early January for my classes and since then I’ve been brainstorming a solution to another related problem in my game and one day while at my day job (the place I hate more than anything else…) I randomly considered an extremely viable solution that I have high confidence in being able to implement with my current skill level. So I’m excited to start on this again.

Also the last few weeks I’ve been working on a small utility app for iOS (mostly for my own usage), and it’s nearly complete! It’s ugly as heck but hey, we all have to start somewhere!

[trashpandarx]

Devlog #2 10-29-23

This devlog is a little late, I was working on transitioning from the most rudimentary mechanics of my game to a proof of concept stage where I’m trying to use the industry standards that I’m aware of from my little professional experience.

Anyway I spent most of this week trying to slowly make my initial mechanics scalable, that means accounting for things I didn’t originally plan for or did plan for, but can’t come into reality until later on. I also changed the structure of my JSON file I’m using about 3 times and that consequently ended up causing me to rewrite parts of my JSON parser a few times as I’ve currently gotten to the point where I’m setting up a rough sample play area.

At the moment I have my marbles instantiating from a prefab randomly across the basic plane i have setup, I still need to add a self-destruct conditional to the prefab game object so that they stop wasting processing power if they leave the play area.

I also am starting to apply custom properties based on my marble-attributes json file to the marbles once instantiated. I went for a property I already did a really simple version of, the material’s color. It seemed like a good choice because its an extremely visible change and easy to identify if one of the marbles didn’t change as expected.

I’m excited to keep going, even though I know I’ve turned this from a demo producible in a month to a small behemoth that will EASILY take months to get from where I am to a demo state. But one step at a time, I need to finish programming and designing this Proof of Concept (PoC). Its daunting and I want to do this in part because I think it would be a fun game, but in larger part because I need something in my professional software portfolio to show that I’m not inept and that I could handle another Entry/Junior SWE role since I got burned for just existing with my last job 😞.

To wrap this all up, my game is coming along slowly but fairly stably for now (knock on wood). I can do it! Who cares if I’m an entry level software engineer, if no one wants to hire me I’LL MAKE MY OWN EXPERIENCE AND PROVE MYSELF!

[trashpandarx]

First Post! 10-20-23

I'm just putting this tumblr together because I figure I should have some degree of a social presence now that I'm really pushing to become a junior software engineer. I'll mostly be posting things related to my personal projects (mostly games and prototyping apps for various devices and software). At present I'm working on a little game just as a demo to prove to potential employers that I actually know how to code and that I really enjoy doing this, while trying to maintain my sanity at my day job. Also please excuse my github, its junky at the moment, I made it a while ago and I've really only been using it lately to keep some of the stuff I've done safe using VCS