Game Development So Far
Last week’s task list continued to focus on UI updates, specifically:
- Finalising the menu panel design – after a few different variations I finally settled on one that I think fits nicely with the style of the game. I was originally going to go for a slight transparency to the panels to enable the user to still see what’s going on behind the scenes but it didn’t look quite right. I may explore the transparency more in a future iteration but for the time being I like the current look.
- Get tabs working- I thought tabs were going to be quite tricky to implement but turns out they were quite simple. I went camping on Friday night and found myself with a couple of hours spare in the evening and a fully charged laptop (what a coincidence J) in those few hours I manged to implement tabs quite nicely and I’m really pleased with the finished look
- Graphs – over the weekend I decided to purchase the Vectrosity plug in for Unity. From everything I’ve researched it seems to be one of the few ways to get consistent looking lines in Unity (you wouldn’t think it was that hard but apparently it is) and therefore essential for creating good looking graphs. I’ve played around with it and have the basics down but I’m still trying to figure out how to scale the graphs properly along with the rest of the UI when screen sizes change.
Other Developments
I had also planned to work on buttons as well last week, and with everything going smoothly I would have been able to fit it in no problem. However, on Sunday I decided to finally get round to backing up Gym Empire to online storage to ensure that I don’t lose 8 months of work should the unthinkable happen. I was planning to use GitHub but it turns out GitHub doesn’t work that well with Unity and large binary files unless you use a certain plugin. I decided I’d just use something simple like Dropbox for the time being until I find a more workable solution, that at least I have some kind of backup. Now the whole project is currently only 4.5 gig, and although there is a lot of stuff in there I don’t need and I’m going to remove I wanted to just take a baseline of the current state. I dragged the folder over to Dropbox and boom… estimated upload time 1500 days… 1500 DAYS!!! WTF!? I left it for a bit and the count came down to 300 days! Still a year to wait, AS IF!! After a while the estimation came down to two days, even that seems ridiculous but it turns out there’s 55000 individual files, and although 4.5 gig isn’t that large, handling all those files is what takes so long. So I’ve left my laptop uploading for two days now…
Obviously this is not my day to day plan for backups but at least for now there is something to go back to should anything happen. I’m going to research some other options and also clean out the Gym Empire project as of those 55000 files I only really need a fraction of them, the rest have just built up over the months as I’ve been trying things out. It sucks to lose a few solid days of development but backing up is as important as anything else if not more. I’d rather lose two days rather than 8 months!
Time Management
In the meantime I’ve been able to do some research behind getting my games onto the Nintendo Switch. There’s a long way to go but watch this space…
- So this week’s tasks (when I get my laptop back!) are:
- Finish off graph implementation
- Refine button design
- Populate all the menu panels of the UI
Gym Empire is now available to add to your Steam Wishlist.
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