Friday 6 March 2015

Sprint Update 6.3.2015 - Follow Cam


Boring production stuff, managing the company and dealing with a broken laptop

Well its been a not so fun sprint for parts of it, we’ve been extremely busy but its that time of year for us and so a lot of it has been accounts and paper work as our annual return is due. I suppose that means that there is something to celebrate there though, Semaeopus Ltd. had it’s 1st birthday at the end of last month, and we didn’t even remember to buy it a present! We would talk you through all the boring production and admin associated with running a company but I don’t think that’s why you came to read this blog so we’ll save that for another time!

To add to the paperwork-heavy sprint, we also ended with a broken laptop, and a broken computer in a two-man development team definitely makes things difficult. So great thanks to everyone who helped organising a new laptop, in the end it took only a few days to get one (which was actually sent all the way from Finland!). Thank you everyone, we now once again have both members of the team working on the project!

…Which brings us to the few actually interesting things we were able to work in this sprint:


Virtual camera operator, right behind you…

After all the sprint meetings sounding a lot like “we really should get a smooth follow cam implemented to make the playing experience more pleasant form a character control perspective” we finally got enough other major things checked off to put this in as a card this sprint, thinking it would be a big task. Turns our Rich had already written some legacy code months ago to try and solve this and then commented it out seeing as he didn’t quite finish it. Thing is, he was only a couple of lines away form complete and he had totally forgotten, so when Pontus picked up this task he was pleasantly surprised to find most of the work had been done already, with a bit of tweaking the we now have much easier controls and smoother camera setup!

Research & testing with Lua scripts

Its been a big sprint for R&D.We put a lot of time into building some tests and working out how Lua integration in Unity functions, with some rather pleasing results. We have now have working test projects with Lua scripts controlling various things, and a in-game user interface that allows players to edit the scripts while the game is running. Time will tell how we’ll end using all that in Off Grid, especially since the game is designed to be playable with controllers, but it’ll all definitely end giving the players easier and more powerful tools for modding the game. Who knows, maybe we can even add the in-game Lua code editor as an optional feature for those playing with mouse and keyboard. That would be an interesting way to deal with hacking various electronics and systems!

That’s pretty much it for now. For the next sprint we have something more exiting planned, but you’ll have to wait a until next sprint update for the details!

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