After writing my last update, I was feeling pretty despondent. I was struggling to get my head around what I needed to do and I was feeling extremely frustrated and somewhat burnt out. I couldn't think. I could see problems and I didn't think that things were working...
Having hit the "Post" button (feeling somewhat fed up with how things were going), I had a short break and told myself "You can do this!"
The challenge that I was overcoming was thinking of a way of making certain elements of my code reusable. Thus making it easier to maintain and easier to code future parts of the game and fortunately, I was able to find a solution soon after.
This gave me a renewed burst of enthusiasm which I have capitalised on over the last few days.
I'm pleased with how the fights have gone and have tweaked how they operate to make them easier to follow. Whether this proves popular or not, please let me know.
I also encountered the first game where a player was nearing death... so I decided to code what happens when a player dies. This needed 3 things to happen:
- Kill the player and tell them they're dead
- Tell my code to stop looking at that game
- Update the Post title so that the little icons change to ☠️
(3) was my priority 😁
Having coded this fairly successfully, I made a little mistake and the poor dead player in question continued their journey for another step, knowing that they were no longer themselves - zombified if you will.
So I fixed the code and they're dead now. So players can die 🥳
As I said, I capitalised upon my enthusiasm and coded a load more scenarios for players on the 3rd floor.
Since I'm still very much in "Alpha Testing" (although it could considered a strange form of "Test-Driven Development"), I'm concentrating on writing the scenarios for the points in the game that players reach that I haven't written yet. Which means that for the time being, the code will be run manually and maybe this adds to the drama and tension of the game 🤷♂️
Alongside writing these scenarios (which are generally very straightforward now), I'm planning to write something so that players who take too long to make their move, slowly die. They're supposed to be hungry after all so they'll now slowly starve to death through their own inaction. I'm quite looking forward to adding this 🙂
Join The Fun
For those that are reading my updates, I invite you to come and join the testing by reading and replying to this post. Bring the most patient part of your personality because things will continue to go wrong but hopefully the biggest hurdles have been overcome.