AA Battery - Week 49 through 52

Unfortunately, I have been a bit lax with developer diary updates over the last 4 weeks, so here’s one update to try and summarise what I’ve been working one before diving off into GitHub GameOff 2018 for November…

Week 49: 8 October - 14 October 2018

This week was a hectically busy as far as game development was concerned. I spent about four hours on AA Battery and thought I had most of the bugs from my new functionality ironed out, so Sas approved my pull request, and we finally got the new CrewManager system into master. Unfortunately, it turned out that some of the bugs came back when not running in the Unity editor, so I had to scramble to make some additional fixes.

That was followed by recording the next episode of our game development podcast. This episode was the second in our series about game design and should be coming out sometime in November or December (I think - Sas is in charge of that). If you’re considering hosting a podcast, you should keep in mind how long these things take to put together! Now we are doing quite a technical cast based on some very technical source material, so our preparation needs to be quite intensive, but still… the new episode was about 1 hour long but took me about four-and-a-half hours of preparation. It’s probably even more time for Sas if you include preparation and editing.

Finally, we closed off the week by hosting the fifth (approximately) Entelect Game Jam. We drew a theme out of a hat and out of the five themes entered by the participants, my theme “Flight”, was the winner. Sas brought along his wife, so they were working in a team for that jam, while I had Almarie Saayman from work joining me for her very first game jam. Two other colleagues also participated, but they only had minimal time to work on their games and ended up not finishing in the available eight hours.

I was extremely happy with what we managed to deliver in just eight hours! The keys were minuscule scope and a relatively simple art style:

Week 50 & 51: 15 October - 28 October

These two weeks I was not very productive, spending only about 2 hours a week, mostly trying to put together the gameplay video that was supposed to go out for week 49. The bugs made that harder than I had anticipated and just killed my motivation.

Here’s the hastily finished video, with some commentary from me:

Week 52: 29 October - 5 November

Finally, this week was the deadline week for reviewing our fellow employees at work, so every spare hour went into finishing off reviews, with no time for game development. We were away for the weekend to play some board games, so I’m only starting with GitHub GameOff today… Expect the first development diary post for that today or tomorrow.