August DevLog: Variables & Messes!

 State of the Game

I converted all of the game's 600+ variables into Playmaker Globals that can be accessed both in scripts and easily within playmaker itself now. It was pretty tedious and took a few days of work to finish what i started but things are ready to be put into action now.

There was even quite a bit of renaming and restructure to make sure that this time around every variable and every function is crystal clear, so no more tangled webs of code I'm afraid to touch. Everything needs to make sense, be efficient, and be accessible from anywhere. 

So now I can focus on the logic that makes the game work. The building blocks are here, now I just gotta put em together.

Setbacks

This past week I've been down with a nasty coughing flu, ruining what should've been a super productive hurricane vacation week (OH, the timing). Combine that with how just as soon as I'm feeling decent enough to sit upright and work, I make a colossal mistake that took and entire Saturday to clean... 

I FOOLISHLY had my Visual Studio Find & Replace settings set to the Entire Project for some reason instead of just the current script I was working on. Long story abrupt, I replaced all "0"s in the codebase with "_" signs. Including all the built-in Unity code i didn't make AND the hundreds of plugins I imported. As you can imagine Unity didn't like that. And it wouldn't let me undo.

If you can imagine dumping glitter all over some precious priceless white rug, or dumping a mug of sand into your gaming keyboard and being tasked with removing each individual grain, or just having thousands of glass shards scattered across your backyard because you're the special kind of klutz who makes cyber-mistakes on a weekly basis, that's sort of what I'm dealing with here.

Had to Find & Replace every possible scenario where it wouldn't make sense for a _ to be and replace it with a 0. The tricky part is accounting for all the variable names involving a _ next to other common symbols. I can imagine this saving me a week's worth of trouble.

After going in and trying to clean up as efficiently as possible, it came down to having to remove the remaining bits of the mess one-by-one and that ate up a day. In truth I should be making backup files on a daily basis, but my last one was just before I got sick about a week ago and I guess this is just how the universe wants to remind me to stay sharp and not laze for a second.

Lesson Noted.

Next Steps

Need to get started with a playable game loop. Have it so you can walk into grass, start a fight, then leave the fight, and repeat.

If I get that much done I can finally stop beating myself up about the game not even being playable. The sprites are here, the variables exist, I figured out playmaker, I got controller inputs to work, the menus and interfaces have been laid out, the entire project's been reorganized, and even the old code logic has been recovered for reference. 

All the pieces are in place. Time to make the magic happen.