Making a lot of progress over the weekend and today after a mired day on Friday. I am like a hungry person finally getting to eat their favorite food. Could write pages about all the cool things I learned from UI creation to Animation parameters. Getting a lot of the course challenges done on my own without so much back and forth; though I often wind up with a very different solution than Jonathan derives. Sometimes I decide to redo the solution to more closely match his work so I don't create disconnects further down the line. Fixing things like adding manager objects and putting the code in the same objects as he does. In one case I developed so many routines across different script files on different objects for a solution that didn't work, I became disoriented after following his solution and came away wondering what I had really done to to make the solution in the end(this was in updating the Score and the Score in the UI). In reflection renaming my variables better for whether they were updating the player score or the GUI score helped untangle it.
Though the time doing the challenges on your own takes extra time to solve, as well as rework redoing it to match the course structure, and cleaning up the mess afterwards — it does seem to be getting me more self dependent in grappling with the challenges.
The Space Shooter app is coming along, here’s short video capture showing some powerups, shield, GUI, and sprite animations:
I ran across another interesting difference with 2D vs 3D Unity apps when I started adding a new type of Enemy. You can see the “Sun” orb object falling (it is a 3D Sun asset, not a sprite), and as it travels across the screen it becomes distorted (elongated) towards the edges of the camera. This is I think expected camera effect, but since everything else is 2D sprites, it looks kind of weird and not what I want:
The “Sun” behavior is not implemented yet, but I intend to experiment with a gravitational effect from these suns that draws the player towards them and makes controlling the players ship more challenging when they pass by.
Logging lots of time, but feeling it paying off by filling in the holes in my knowledge and burning in my coding skills better thru repetition.
