Eight Minute Empire II

Well, at least when the easy AI is involved, my "goods" strategy holds up.  Go for the crystals and the "wild" resources and score yourself an easy six points.  That's usually more than enough to swing the win your way.  Doesn't mean I'll always win, but about 2/3 or 3/4.  Enough that I could make a living in Vegas playing board games.

....Vegas.  Board games.  Holy crap someone needs a board game casino.  In bed with the mob for wood, bricks, ore, and wool/sheep?  Crazy.  I'm almost of the opinion someone needs to sponsor me in the endeavor.   Wow....that doesn't exist except as betting on other games (I'm searching Google)?  That's wild...must be the time to income ratio.  But you'd think with high rollers that could be resolved.  Or at least made part and parcel of an existing casino.  

LOL...and then of course I'm proven very, very wrong moments later when I'm not approaching it from a balanced perspective...

Well....I did say 2/3 or 3/4....

Troubleshooting

The presenter in the Scavengers tutorial barrels along faster than I can type, and I'm not slow.  I was pretty sure I'd miss something.  And I did.  My food and soda wouldn't pick up and it took me a long time to realize I'd misnamed my method with 2d instead of a 2D.

But what really got me wasn't something I could control.  When my level was resetting, it wouldn't recreate the board.  I changed from a deprecated method to the new loadscene version.  And then I started putting in debug.log statements (didn't I say this felt like old school VB once before?).  After trying to narrow it down, it appeared my Awake function wasn't triggering, so the board wasn't repopulating.  I compared their completed version with my version of the script, and the prefab, everything else, all to no avail.  Finally, in this five year old post (long before the current version of Unity) someone mentioned that Awake() doesn't always refire and you have to code it up under OnLevelWasLoaded() to catch logic after the first time.  I dropped it in there - cut and paste rather than appropriate refactoring - and success!  So for anyone else who's getting Awake() or InitGame() events that aren't firing when they expect them to, OnLevelWasLoaded() is a good place to call your logic again to be sure it triggers.

You can see the affect of the bug on not rebuilding subsequent levels in the video.

Unity3d - the Asteroids

I've made it as far as adding the asteroids on a wave basis and allowing for explosions between the shots and the rocks and the rocks and the ship.

I'm also reading Nystrom's Game Programming Patterns, which make sense in the context of the mesh and transforms I'm using, but is much more about traditional software patterns.  Still, a very good read.

XCOM

I finished a round of XCOM: Enemy Unknown for the XBox 360 yesterday.  I don't finish much on the XBox (or the Wii, or the PS2 for that matter). I'm just not willing to dedicate the time, even when I'm laid up in bed for a month or two.  I did finish all the achievements in Minecraft, but you can't really finish that game, you just wear out.  The same can probably be said of Skyrim and definitely of Call of Duty. XCOM is a fond memory for me, because back in 1994 and 1995 (around the time we were moving between Richfield and St. Louis Park) I played a lot of XCOM: UFO Defense and Terror from the Deep.  The new one doesn't bring back the joy I had when I was twenty years younger and it looked like this.  I found myself a little disappointed because I missed the buttons and the imaginative detail I put into the less well rendered soldiers.  But I renamed quite a few of the soldiers to compensate.  Kyle died twice, and only Kyle III was around to participate in the end, although he was back at base recuperating.  And a combination of a sniper named after myself and a psionic solider named after Amy from Doctor Who (red hair, despite a Japanese last name) won the game.  Eryn got into it when she realized I'd renamed the characters and that they'd been developing a bit of history over the course of the game.  She's started playing now that I made it through it once.

Given how much time it takes to win these games, I wonder that I ever had the time to play through these not once, but many times each.  I was working hourly wages about 50-60 hours a week at the time.  It gets stranger for me when I realize 1995 was four years before I started at my current job as a contractor (I went full time about two years later), so in 1996-1997 I had been at my first full time contracting gig for a year.  That seems about right given I remember how excited I was when VB 5.0 came out in 1997.  This computer technology is one to two years older - max, probably less than a year for Terror from the Deep - than when I started working as someone who programmed computers with Visual Basic 4 (16 bit).

And yet, here I am again, finishing a game of XCOM.