Final Exam devlog (Patreon)

Hi! Helen's here! Continuing my devlog.

I'm writing this text and I'm really crying! This weekend I thought my nerves were just going to give out! Plus, it was made worse by the fact that I only managed to work on the game on Saturday evening.

I fully experienced the horrors of coding this weekend.

When I made the previous version of the game on the old IFAction engine, I just built the application from ready-made modules, as if from a constructor. All I had to do was make some simple customizations. I really liked IFAction a lot! Too bad this engine is very glitchy and its support team is no longer answering.

The new engine has a number of ready-made templates that make it easier to create some game mechanics. However, I still have to do a lot of coding to get the desired result. The only thing that makes my work easier is that in the new engine I don't have to type every command manually. Visual scripting is provided here.

Nevertheless, now I have to code a lot! And it is very hard for a person who has never done programming before!

This weekend I wanted to make the first attacking enemy girl. Before I started programming the enemy's behavior, I tried to create its algorithm on paper. I thought I had accounted for everything possible in the behavior, and I thought I would have no problem transferring the algorithm into code... I was wrong!

I worked on the enemy girl's attacking behavior all last evening. And I spent a lot of nerves that evening. What looked good on paper didn't want to work when translated into code! I made correction after correction, but the enemy girl didn't want to do what was required of her.

I was desperate! That evening I really wanted to stop developing the game. I thought that maybe game development wasn't my thing, and it should be someone else's job, but not a single mom with two kids.

Eventually, after a lot of hard work, I managed to get closer to the intended result. Now the enemy girl can make an attacking move when the protagonist approaches her. However, dealing damage to the player has not yet been finalized. I just didn't have the energy or time to do it.

Despite the fact that I almost managed to achieve the intended result, I still have very unpleasant memories of the process of creating the code. Maybe I'm overly sensitive, but I still get tears when I remember last evening! Of course, I didn't have time to work on my second game this weekend. And the thought came to me that I would have to somehow rearrange my work schedule to devote more time to game development.

I think I'll revise my schedule early next year, when the New Year's rush subsides a bit.

Today, however, I'm updating the working build of the game for paid subscribers. For testing purposes, I put new enemy girls in the very first location. From their attack, for now, you can not get damage. However, the damage is caused by touching the girl.