Personal Update:
So this was my first week of focused game development. I took a break from the laminate floors and just worked on my game. About half-way through my first full dedicated day, an old friend/co-worker calls me to tell me about a game development job opening up at his company that he thinks I'd be perfect for. It's good money, and 90% work from home too. The only drawback I know about so far is that it wouldn't be MY cool turn-based space game. Instead, it would be educational games targeted towards younger kids.
At first, I was dismissing it out of hand. But the more I thought about it, the better and better it sounded. It would mean dedicating less time to my game, but it would also put me closer to retirement. My interview is on Tuesday, but I'm not sure what I'll decide if I'm offered the job. Woe is me and my first-world problems...
Dev Update:
I spent the early part of the week cleaning up my combat text code and trying a few different techniques until I had something I was happy with. Getting text to look nice is not NEARLY as straight-forward as it should be. I might add a few more features and try to publish it on the asset store for a few bucks.
While I was headbutting Unity into producing pretty text, my wife worked through some health bar tutorials and got some decent graphics going there. I had to help her with some of the code but it was surprisingly helpful for her to work through the early steps while I concentrated on other things. By the time I had wrapped up my floating combat text, I was ready to plug in the health bars. I added an animating effect to them so it wasn't just an instant update.
Destroying the ship game object on death was easy, but it just disappearing was lame. So I iterated through the child hierarchy, split apart all the components, and added random force and rotation to each piece. So far, I think it's looking pretty cool.
I'm not sure what I'll be doing next week. Monday, I'll be preparing for my interview. If I get offered the job, I'll be focusing nearly all my efforts on HTML5 game development so that I'm better equipped to start my new job. If I'm not offered the job, I'm not sure which feature I'll work on next. Particle effects, shields, different weapons, different ship types, movement.
Tip from your uncle Eck:
World Canvas text has lots of issues. The canvas is MASSIVE and "normal" sized fonts (10-18 pt) look like pixelated garbage. Lots of posts say the "solution" is to use HUGE fonts (128-136 pt) and scale it down by 1/100th. To me this feels like a hacky-ass work aroundand there's also some graphical artifacts doing it this way.
Take a look at the horizontal line in the k. It also makes shadows/outlines look like garbage (not shown). I'm sure there is a better solution with world-space canvases, I'm just not sure what it is. Instead I used an overlay canvas and just spawn it at the appropriate spot.
It's tough to make out in the screenshot, but that blurry bit of white above the k in hacky is very visible in the game. There's also a vertical line to the right of the k. Bleh.