Day 15: All Shook Up
It’s a late night here in my home office, and by home office I mean a papasan chair paired with a fold-out eating tray next to my bed. This is an entry for Friday, December 11 and the wee hours of Saturday, December 12 — the longest day of my short life in coding.
By now I planned on being in the early stages of Phase II. If I’m being honest, I thought I’d have started Phase II yesterday. Implementing a camera shake effect for every time the player takes damage proved to be an absolute brain scrambler of a task. I spent all day Thursday and Friday careening between various forums, YouTube videos, and the Unity Script API for solutions, but I could not for the life of me get any bit of code to stick the way I wanted it to. Frustrated, I took some time after the work day ended to have dinner and mull things over. I knew I wouldn’t be able to relax until I got the effect to work, so I hopped back onto my laptop and tried again.
This time around, I found an amazing tutorial by user @gamesplusjames on YouTube, which I will link below.
The script written in the video made all my camera shake hopes and dreams come true. I had to tailor it to match the settings I wanted in my game, but it turned out beautifully. I then added an extra camera script that targets the player and follows it around the game — just to add some extra control over the view of the game scene.
This week pushed me to my critical thinking limit, but I’m so proud of what I accomplished. Ease of a task is subjective — what may be simple for one programmer can prove somewhat difficult for another. I’m learning not to be so tough on myself for not immediately grasping every concept.
Now that I can breathe without the thought of the camera shake haunting me, I’ve found some great free assets to use to make a visual thruster-charge element in my game — the last section I have left to complete in Phase I. I’ll be working on this over the weekend so I can have a fresh start in Phase II by Monday. The end is nigh!
