I haven't been home at all today; literally I woke up at work from last night and am sleeping here again tonight. So I haven't had access to dev environment. Instead, I dug up the google doc for my next big solo game and dug through it, since I could do that during a break.

I spend an hour polishing it and rewriting parts I didn't like. Specifically, I tweaked the rules for offscreen combat to be a little less dumb and a little more under the players' control. I revisited my enemy archetypes and made them a little more exciting and less cliche. I made combat zones have more obvious effects for combatants, both when the players is fighting there and when they are fighting elsewhere. Finally, I have revised my decision to only allow one player character to be involved in combat at a time. There will now be one onscreen combat with, and the ability to move your party to participate in multiple offscreen combats simultaneously

Weeee. I'm an ideas man that spent his chunk of time today coming up with more ideas. How productive.

tl;dr I can fade images in Unity now. Woo

I'm still learning Unity, slowly. I think I've exhausted the Tutorial resources, for now. To start really getting my hands dirty, I'm working on a dating simulator. At first I thought it would be a way to prove I knew how to change scenes, display sprites, and do simple effects like transforms and sprite indexing. Now that I know that I see that the real challenge is going to be creating a content creation workflow.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Today I learned how to do a simple fade. Turns out there's three ways; calculating alpha values based on delta time and setting the alpha value manually, using Mathf.lerp to tween values automatically and still setting alpha manually, and using the CrossFadeAlpha function to do exactly what I need. Guess which method was hardest to find?

Also discovered that Unity tends to deal in milliseconds, or at least does for this function.