Tying the Bow

Thankfully I am very close to finishing the Warp game. This past week was Easter, and due to a very generous work calendar, I had the whole week free. I was going to go back to my hometown, relax and take the opportunity to push through all the interesting features that I had pending: power pick-ups, AI enemy for solo players, tweaking the controls in the settings… Instead, I got infected with COVID and therefore had to stay and quarantine at my place in Madrid. It was not too bad, just a couple of days of high-ish fever and feeling beaten up, but after that I was left just a cough and a bit of congestion.

I took that time to reflect and finally decide that all those shiny features were not needed. Well, AI might have been nice, but I started coding, found it was way more difficult than I anticipated and decided to bail out of it. This project was already expanding in time and scope beyond what I already anticipated, and to be fair it is my most polished game to date. So I spent that time polishing it a bit more: tweaking the menus, changing the pushing mechanics to be fairer, etc. With all of these, pending a couple of initial flash screens and sound effects, the game is pretty much ready to go. I want to create a page in itch.io, mainly to start creating a kind of portfolio there.

In retrospect, my biggest mistake probably was to not combine all ship scripts into a single one sooner (or even make them one at the beginning). I thought the mechanics would be too different initially so I started off with separate scripts, but then the differences between the ships could be parametrised easily and there were huge chunks of code that were exactly the same. By the time I did combine them all, I had already done a lot of Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V across all scripts, and it was way less painful to merge them than anticipated. Well, you live and you learn and hopefully you don’t repeat the same stupid mistakes.