Devlog

I missed last week devlog, mostly because I did almost no progress but also because it was a bad week overall, personally and in terms of work, nothing too bad but you know that feeling when you barely made any progress, despite tons of work hours? So one of those weeks. But onto game5 progress. Importers I managed to finish some of the importers (spreadsheets -> ScriptableObjects + prefabs) that I was working on, right now I can just glance over values on a spreadsheet, tweak, and have it export all the Scriptable Objects, generating the prefabs with corresponding data and images and test them. I could have made the game parse the spreadsheet at boot time and create them, but I decided against it, I want to generate this process offline. One of the reasons is because I have more control over not replacing existing items GUIDs (to keep and existing links), and also I can tweak any individually generated files manually, if I need to. ...

Nothing announced, not even a name decided, but I want to vaguely blog about it as a means of brainstorming with myself. I’ll be vague as heck until I’m sure I have something worth “here’s a new game”, if that ever turns out to be the case. So this week’s it’s progress on my “on-going not yet announced game because not ready and might be bad” game, which I decided to for now on call Game5 here, so it’s easier to know what we are talking about. ...

After mostly a week of anxiety, for thousands and thousands of developers, Unity changed the rules again, and first glance, it’s better for the immediate problems it would cause for active and in-development games. They removed the retroactive aspect of the “pay-per-game-install”, so only for someone on Unity 2023 LTS+ (launching next year) will that apply, current projects will not be affected. Small relief, as long as we can keep using existing versions with current Terms of Service. This will be impossible on mobile and consoles in a short time frame due to SDKs, but for PC should be fine. ...

As I’m starting to write this post I’m on my way to my home town for the holidays, so I may not post it in a couple days. It’s been a crazy year(s)(?) and I’m taking these near 4h of travel to write down some things. I’m sorry if it’s incoherent, this is mostly a dump of thoughts. For those who follow my work a bit more closely you probably know that for almost 4 years the project I dedicated more time was Quest of Dungeons, which started development in 2013. ...

Last time we talked I was porting the engine to run on the actual Xbox One hardware, since them I managed to port the whole engine, it’s now running (not 100% stable), sound, rending, and input, all working. Since that part is a bit better now I decided to focus some time on new content, such as localization, the new dungeons and stuff that still doesn’t properly work with a controller. ...

I’ve been doing a lot of menus and gamepad specifics related work lately. My first step has been to make sure all menus are easy to use with a Xbox One controller, and while most of the menus in the main screen are usable, inside the game they are not. Everything was made with mouse in mind at first so I decided to remake all of them again in a different way. The idea is that you press a button, popup a full blown menu and can use the shoulder buttons to switch tabs, DPAD to navigate items and ABXY for actions. ...

Working on Dary’s Legend has been my daily routine so I decided to make a time lapse. So this is a video compiled using Chronolapse, by taking a screenshot every 60s during a couple of days while I’m working on Dary’s Legend, the new game from Different Pixel. The video is being played back at 10 real minutes per second. This was recorded between 14-06-2012 and 30-06-2012 (some days are missing) ...

Since Windows Phone 7 doesn’t have multitask, at least for now, Microsoft implemented a Tombstone notion in WP7 apps. It’s basically a suspended state where you receive a notification that it’s going to suspend but there is no guarantee that it will resume, it might be terminated so you must treat this as an exit and a might start again state. So depending on you app you might want to save the current state just in case the app really closes. ...

I decided to run a little poll to track what platforms do you target as a game developer. I think this should be interesting. Please share this post link or the direct link to the poll (http://twtpoll.com/dar51l) so that we can have more accurate results. The poll closes in about 6 days and you can select various options of course.

It’s been around two weeks since my last post. Basically because I’ve been busy porting my engine Basalt to iPhone/iPad. If you follow me on twitter you might have known this already since I ranted pretty much at start, moving platform and language is always painful if you are used to other conventions/shortcuts etc. So it all started with my wish to port Vizati to the iPhone, since the game is already running on PC, Xbox360 and Windows Phone 7 one can only wish for an easy and quick port since pretty much all base code is done. ...