Day 3…4…5… Failure…

Day 3…4…5… Failure…

It’s becoming more apparent failure is a part of coding. I’ve been working for the last three days to try and finish the endless runner so I can move on to the next project.

Let’s start at the top, first was getting the player from filebase and starting the animation system with mixamo. I wasn’t able to make the mixamo animations to take hold of the body figure of the filebase character, eventually after 3 hours I figured out I was using the wrong prefab and finally got the animations working.

Next error was more a skill based error. The character kept rotating on the Y axis, my first instinct was to give the character a rigidbody system and lock the rotational constraints, this made my character glitch through the map as well as not fixing the rotation. We moved to coding the rotation to freeze, I used “transform.rotation = Quaternion.Euler(0,0,0)” it did not work and instead of getting stressed out over it I decided to leave it and work on the enemies.

Enemies in the endless runner were supposed to be unique giving the player a variety of challenges to make the game fun. We started with a standard obstacle in this case a tumbleweed that bounces down the screen. We got the tumbleweed into the game then became the bouncing animation. We made a custom animation for the tumbleweed by adjusting the Y position up and down as it made its way down the screen. However it had the same problem as the player, it would rotate and fall through the floor. Frustrated with the recurring bug I again moved on to the next asset in the game the power up.

Power ups were definitely the easier task, first power up was shoes and when the player collects them he runs faster. This was my first success in these struggles. I simply multiplied the speed after collecting the shoes and made a coroutine for the cooldown. Next power up a weapon, put a baseball bat as the power up as the player collects the bat they get a bat and can swing at the enemies to collect more points. This at first sounded simple but to save you a novel of errors and inability to make this work I will just say the player never got a baseball bat…

I’m a beginner at coding, I could have easily gone the route of showing my certifications tutorials step by step putting things into my own words posted it on medium acting as if I knew what I was doing to land me a job. This is not the route for me, as disappointing as this medium post is for me to write, I’m not looking for just another job. I’m looking to fulfill my passion in becoming a creator. I will grow from this failure and will become the best programmer.

Tomorrow’s goal:

Tomorrow is day 6 and I’m supposed to be releasing a ping pong project. I now know I need to scope my projects a bit smaller to better understand programming.

Thank you for the read —

Adrian.

P.S. If your goal is to land a job and you’re a rookie like I am, I’d suggest not flaunting your failures to a job networking website... ;)