I watched a tutorial last night on working with Unity’s UI Toolkit. I went into this vibe coding experience so blindly that I had no idea the UI Toolkit actually includes a GUI editor! Context context context—It’s the single most important thing when developing code nowadays. Now I feel confident that I’m close to getting the animation curve setup working.
Still, I went to bed fretting over the fact I’d have to spend another day at the office trying to get the animation curve editor working. Then, I woke up this morning to news that the contract job for an interactive art project I landed has a new deadline of November 11th. So soon! Things quickly began to morph into perspective.
My in-game settings menu already works well enough that I can control most of the important physics variables and post-processing effects during runtime. Tweaking animation curves at runtime will not be required for my upcoming demo. In fact, there are several particle-related settings that are far more important to this runtime menu than any of the animation curves used in my scene calibration. Those need to take priority. Ergo, those pesky curves can wait!
I picked up a short-throw projector this afternoon that I’ll be using for the FilmGate Fusion event at the Frost Museum on the 18th. It helps to have friends with gear (thanks Drew).
I last demoed the project at the Frost Museum in July, so my FilmGate patrons know not to expect any massive upgrades on the software side of things. Still, I hope to convey the illusion of a massive upgrade by A). projecting the experience over a larger canvas, and B). capturing clear user-footage from the event for socials.
Getting my hands on a projector was the first step. Tomorrow, I’ll be dropping by the Frost and doing a test run where I run some calibrations and figure out the best location to set up shop. Then, this weekend, I’ll try screen recording the energy ball experience from another device using a capture card. I’ll finally get to use my card for something other than streaming cable TV to my laptop, ayy. No last minute code freezes, please. Preparation is key and this time I expect to be ready!
All this talk of preparation really made me want to better organize my Tasks page. I use Linear for task management at work, and decided to borrow most of the categories we use on my dev team. Now, instead of sorting my tasks by type (do ASAP/major/minor/enhancement/fix/research), I’ll now sort everything by priority. Important/pending stuff belongs at the top—simple as that. Now, my categories are:
- In Progress
- Selected for Development
- Backlog (but in progress) — (this happens too often)
- Backlog
- Parking Lot
- Research
I prefix bug fixes with “Fix:” and should probably use a similar system for other types. Or maybe I’ll use hashtags. I’m still figuring this out.
Oh the irony. All this talk of prioritizing what’s important and I just went ahead and built custom style rules for the Tasks page. Now, empty sections show “No tasks”. I also added a nice improvement to my task processing script UX that makes it so I can use my up/down arrow keys to assign a task to a different section rather than having to type out the new section.
Select a section (↑/↓ arrows, space/enter to select, q to keep current):
In Progress
Selected for Development
→ Backlog (but in progress)
Backlog
Parking lot
Research
Current: Selected for DevelopmentTo be fair, it’s less obvious I’m not working on actual work when I don’t have a Unity Editor open.
Tags: unity ui animation ar post-processing projection gamedev animation-curve