Progress has been very slow for the past 2 weeks. In fact, I barely worked on my dad’s battle ship game. To be fair, I was dogsitting my partner’s dog for the first time, which made me very anxious and caused the loss of many hours of sleep. By the time I was done with the workday, my brain was barely functioning. The dog is now gone, my cats and myself can finally relax and, despite some more sleep issues caused by daylight savings, anxiety and work stress, I still felt good enough to spend some time on the project this week.

I thought I was done with the drag and drop. I was so, so wrong. Testing out the feature, I found a few bugs, and I am still tracking a few of them. And I decided to implement the rule saying that ships can’t be next to each other, which caused many more issues. I’m not sure how I am going to fix this yet, to be honest. I think the first step will be to comment out the exclusion zone idea, and just get the basic drag and drop working. Then I can worry about the rest.

I thought work was slowing down and that I would have some time to dedicate to this. On this too, I was very wrong. I did have one slow day last week, but after that, it’s been non-stop. Oh well.

One funny thing: I was having issues with the Godot text editor on my Mac mini. For some reason, clicking to place the cursor and selecting text was not as precise as it should have been, with noticeable delays between the click and the action being executed. I did a bit of digging, and it turns out it was an issue with Magnet, the utility I use to move windows around. I turned Magnet off and now everything works fine. Since I’m not really using Magnet all that much, I might just leave it off moving forward.

I printed my Kanban board over the weekend (I prefer to plan on paper for some reason) and spent some time changing the wording on a few cards. I also added a few, and built some form of vague schedule for myself. This project has been on the back of my mind for a while, and I need to get it out of the way. The goal for this week is to finalize the initial placement of ships for the player and the drag & drop. The next two will be spent on the opponent AI, and the last two on finalizing gameplay and reworking the UI and the animations.

Though I’ve been a programmer for a very long time, and some of it does translate, I still feel like a complete beginner. It turns out making a video game, even a very basic one, is totally different from programming boring business applications. Who would have thought!