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Malcolm Gladwell wrote a piece on attempts to popularize the idea of small-batch, artisanal ketchups in like 2004 and the thing is an adventure.

Oh my god. Yes, that solved it. I mean I have an idea of what the code is meant to do here, it's clamping the position of the enemy ships so the swerve behavior doesn't take them beyond the boundaries of the play area, but by passing them the x value to their z position, I'm guessing I was keeping them from existing outside of a 12-unit square centered on the world origin. I am two for two for frustrating issues caused by typo blindness.

The position transforms of the enemy ships model and the parent gameobject are both zeroed out. When I disable the Evasive Maneuver script component and just have their movement behavior controlled by the Mover script component alone, they behave (and spawn) just like the asteroids. When the Evasive Maneuver script is active, though, I get this: And this is the script: using UnityEngine; using System.Collections; public class EvasiveManeuver : MonoBehaviour { public float dodge; public float smoothing; public float tilt; public Vector2 startWait; public Vector2 maneuverTime; public Vector2 maneuverWait; public Boundary boundary; private float currentSpeed; private float targetManeuver; private Rigidbody rb; // Use this for initialization void Start () { rb = GetComponent<Rigidbody> (); currentSpeed = rb.velocity.z; StartCoroutine (Evade()); } IEnumerator Evade() { yield return new WaitForSeconds (Random.Range (startWait.x, startWait.y)); while (true) { targetManeuver = Random.Range (1, dodge) * -Mathf.Sign (transform.position.x); yield return new WaitForSeconds (Random.Range (maneuverTime.x, maneuverTime.y)); targetManeuver = 0; yield return new WaitForSeconds(Random.Range (maneuverWait.x,maneuverWait.y)); } } // Update is called once per frame void FixedUpdate () { float newManeuver = Mathf.MoveTowards (rb.velocity.x, targetManeuver, Time.deltaTime * smoothing); rb.velocity = new Vector3 (newManeuver, 0.0f, currentSpeed); rb.position = new Vector3 ( Mathf.Clamp (rb.position.x, boundary.xMin, boundary.xMax), 0.0f, Mathf.Clamp (rb.position.x, boundary.zMin, boundary.zMax) ); rb.rotation = Quaternion.Euler (0.0f, 0.0f, rb.velocity.x * -tilt); } } Edit: So I'm isolating portions of the code to try to drill down to where the issue is. When I comment out the entire FixedUpdate function, the movement behavior is same as the asteroids. When I comment out the rb.position statement specifically, the movement now appears to be correct: /* rb.position = new Vector3 ( Mathf.Clamp (rb.position.x, boundary.xMin, boundary.xMax), 0.0f, Mathf.Clamp (rb.position.x, boundary.zMin, boundary.zMax) ); */ I don't see any discrepancies between the code I entered when following the tutorial and the example code given beneath it, so either there's something important I'm not catching, or the example code is incorrect. But as it works without this statement, I'm calling mine done. Maybe I'll come back to it later when I have a better understanding of what the code is meant to do here.

I think that's a good idea, I've already sunk like 12 hours into it so far this week. I also created a set of flashcards based on the lessons in the first section of Unity's scripting tutorials, if that's useful to anyone.

So I've gotten all the way to the end of the Space Shooter tutorial and everything is copacetic EXCEPT: my enemy ships spawn randomly in the play area itself, rather than the top of the screen, and the Mover script doesn't move them downward through the play field the same way it does with the asteroids. Considering both the GameController and Mover scripts drive the spawn location and the downward movements of both the asteroids and the enemy ships, I can't figure out what would cause this behavior. Currently I'm digging through the unity forums to see if anyone else has had similar issues, and how they solved it.

You could do like I did the last time the deal came around, which is get it and then not crack it open for months and months and months. Because that's close to a thousand dollars' worth of software for $15.

Gamemaker Pro bundle on Humble for the next week or two.

Done! I also tried the webgl build option to do a test submission, since I haven't uploaded anything to itchio before, and while my game seems to load just fine, for some reason it doesn't seem to be picking up keyboard input. Which is weird, because it plays fine in Unity itself.

Oh that's rad! I'm gonna have to figure out how to operate that myself when I finish this week's project.

So this week we're doing space shooter! If you wanted to participate last week, the roll-a-ball tutorial was not especially challenging or time-consuming, you should have no trouble catching up.

Tonight I wrote like 2500 words of oversharing in which I stress about my unemployability and continued failure to achieve basically any of my life's aspirations, if you're into that sort of thing.

Awesome! I thought about going beyond the constraints of the project as described, but didn't. D:

It looks like a popular brand of filipino banana ketchup is sold in the US as Jufran Banana Sauce. Next time I'm at an asian supermarket I'm looking for it.

Apparently the first ketchups had nothing at all to do with tomatoes.

I am still kind of impressed at the gall necessary to put the difficulty in using your product front and center as a selling point.

When my sister was little, she'd fill a bowl with ketchup and dip plain white bread into the ketchup, suck the ketchup off, and dip the same piece back in again. It was so gross. I told this story in my speech at her wedding and we haven't spoken since.

I finished and exported a build of the roll-a-ball game, which you can download here if you want to play it on windows. The only snag I encountered was in case sensitivity - my script for the player object called start() rather than Start() and so there was about twenty minutes of me being frustrated because I couldn't figure out why nothing was happening. I noticed under each tutorial there's a list of related tutorials that go into more depth each of the concepts explored, I'm gonna try to dig into as many of them as I can before the week is out:

Edited the first post to hopefully make it a little more clear what we're up to here!

Not specifically relevant to the subject of game development, but Merlin Mann's maxfuncon talk on doing creative work is a favorite of mine.

Yeah, my short-term objective here is to have enough facility with Unity to participate in the Winter Wizard Jam on my own, rather than just through contributing art to other projects, and obviously my longer-term objective is to make my own games (or collaborate meaningfully with more skilled friends). I don't really know exactly how long it would take to work through each of the tutorials, but I figure if a project is relatively short, doing it in a week is no big deal, and if one of the tutorial sets winds up being notably more involved then pushing it out another weak is also no big deal.

That's a lot of progress in a very short amount of time! What does your study regimen consist of, if you don't mind sharing? Also, I lurk polycount daily but I almost never post on account of I always feel like clownshoes compared to the average polycounter. I know it's ridiculous and that targeted feedback from qualified people is very valuable but there's still this persistent welsh troll voice in my head telling me I have to bring my own work up to an acceptable minimum standard before I go tracking mud all over Polycount's nice carpet. D:

Heinz yellow mustard is mostly tumeric and has little, if any actual mustard content.

There's an awful lot of talk in this thread of inappropriate condiments on pizza but have you taken a moment to consider that people are replacing bread-based pizza crust with cauliflower? There's like a whole universe of google results for cauliflower pizza. Like if you're that desperate to remove carbs from your diet you could just.. not eat pizza? Instead of sending it to pizza hell??