Motivation and Persistence

Sometimes It's hard to find the drive to keep pushing; especially when the beginning easy stuff is out of the way.

When you start a project, you make a lot of progress really fast, and then you hit a point where all of the wins are pretty complex and time consuming; you have to blend together all of the systems, and find flaws that you had made that you have to rewrite to accommodate all of the dependencies. If you're not careful, you end up with some  ridiculously unreadable spaghetti code that makes you want to end the project.

Developing the skill of organizing and as your build has been probably the most important thing I've after learning how to program and use Unity. Understanding what "done" really means for your features.

• I used to think "if it works it's done".
• Then I learned "If it works, then make it modular, so it can fit into other scenarios, then it's done"
• Then I learned "If it works, and it's plug and play for other scenarios, then you need to refactor the code and make sure it's written and optimized for the specific scenario you're using it in. essentially forking the original code to meet the SPECIFIC need of the feature."

Once you have optimized your modified feature and it works, then it's done, at least that what I think now. All of these steps can make things REALLY cumbersome, but in the long run, future you is going to thank past you when you make something like a door that functions as a teleporter and it's set up and ready to be used for any kind of player/enemy transition.

In the coming week, I'm going to be building actual levels and working out what to do with the empty environments. I can't wait to show you all what this game looks like in the end.

Zach