This is a late post because my computer was out of commission for a couple days. I got it up and running again, but my main drive got wiped clean while reinstalling windows. Luckily I had most of my data backed up so I was able to recover my important files. Not fun and having to reinstall all programs and setting up some project files delayed my plans for last week.
Before my computer bricked, I was able to get a small Python program working with my Robinhood account. The program currently reads my account info (username, password, authorization key, etc.) from a text file to login to Robinhood. The program can only perform a couple of actions: buy and sell shares with a function that takes two parameters (a string for the ticker’s name and an int for the amount of shares the user wants to purchase or sell). It’s also able to get stock prices from the terminal. It’s very bare bones, but I hope I can get some time this weekend to start designing the rest of the program before I continue coding anything else for it.
With all the troubleshooting stuff with my computer, I didn’t get much time to play any games last week other than these two small games on Itch.io: Windwarrior and Space Blitz X. The first title is a Top-Down action game for the browser. I enjoyed the few minutes I played Windwarrior. You play as a samurai that is guarding a small circle at the center of a circular map from waves of crab enemies and tanks. Once the circle’s health reaches zero, you lose. The samurai has three major abilities. The first lets him build a wall anywhere on the map which prevents crabs and tank projectiles from crossing through the wall. A dash ability that lets you move across the map faster. The player can also use a strong wind attack towards enemies to cause extra damage. Each ability has a cooldown timer which prevents players from spamming the ability and encourages them to be more strategic about when they use it because the enemies spawn at faster rate the longer you play and the round becomes too overwhelming. The game is very bare bones, but I did enjoy the core gameplay. There’s some little things I would change, like assigning the dash to the space bar, adding visual/audio cue to telegraph when enemies are attacking, and audio cue for when the player’s ability has cooldown. Otherwise, this was a cool wave based action game.
There’s not much to say about Space Blitz X other than it’s also a wave based shooter. This game has the player defending Earth from waves of asteroids. When the Earth’s health reaches zero, the planet’s destroyed and it’s game over. The player defends the planet from an immobile spaceship by using the keypad to aim the reticule and shoot incoming asteroids. I don’t know why the developer didn’t use the mouse to aim because it’s difficult to land shots because the asteroids move too fast to accurately hit. I didn’t really have fun with this and the shooting didn't feel good.
This week I plan to acquaint myself with my 2D project like I originally planned. I’m also going to delay the postmortem blog for my cube prototype for a later day. This isn’t because of my computer issues, but I feel like I should get more people to playtest the prototype before I move forward with my postmortem. I posted a build to several game development groups on Discord, Facebook, and Reddit but only received a couple of responses. At least people are seeing and engaging with my posts because I’ve received some likes/thumbs up on them, but only a fraction of those people are downloading it from my itch.io page. So I'll just continue to wait until more responses trickle in. Until then.