Wow... Has it really been since January for a Periodic update? Guess so. In that case, what have I been working on then? Well long story short, it's been about that long since anything has been attempted to get done on this. Day job is priority, and always will be. But it seems like things have died down enough to actually get some stuff done and here we are. As per the usual...
TL:DR - Life update, musician joined the team, level design, code refactoring, and menu design updates.
Update - Oh boy, am I looking forward to giving an update on this. It's been a little more than 6 months since I really sat down and looked at anything on this game, and it feels good to be back.
So what's been happening in the last few months? Well, I've had some personal stuff that I've been taking care of, and now that it's all said and done, I've been able to recalibrate and get some stuff done. One of the big things is meeting up with an old friend of mine, who when I told him about Periodic said he'd be on board with doing the music.
Music was something I really wasn't looking forward to doing, but teaming up with someone who's wanting to work on this project as much as I am is giving me more motivation to actually get this thing some momentum again.
On top of that, I've started working on going through and really focusing on getting level design and code cleaned up. I've learned a lot of stuff in the last year and with that comes time to do a little bit of refactoring and cleaning up stuff that was named bad when I was trying to get stuff working.
I also found that if you want to use some form of "const" in C#, the "in" keyword for is the solution. So why do this? Well, as a C++ developer by day, using "const" is something I do all the time. This makes it to where the passed value can't be changed within the function. It's designed to keep APIs clean and predictable. Since I'm trying to keep the code reusable, this is a step in the right direction.
To finish this up, the only other thing I've been working on that's game related and noteworthy is making sure the menus flow and load quickly with a consistent design theme. It's taken a little while, but I think I'm finally on the right track with this one. I'm really liking my hexagon designs, and I'm working on incorporating that into the rest of the menus.
What's Next - Right now it's looking like some code cleanup and fixing stupid stuff I wrote in a year ago needs to happen. Maybe start working on getting music and level design sorted out.
That should do it for this round on Periodic, hope to catch ya in the next one!
-TJ
