Dev Diary

I’ve failed to update this development diary for a couple of weeks, because I got sidetracked by Ludum Dare 42… here’s a quick update before hopefully returning to the normal schedule this week.

Sorry for the late update! It was Ludum Dare 42 this weekend and against my better judgement I ended up making an entry during whatever bits of time I could scrounge over the weekend with Monday for polishing. It’s probably not my best work, but I consider it my most successful foray into roguelike and / or turn-based mechanics - you can give it a try here. Week 40 was absolutely terrible for AA Battery with work grinding to a complete halt this past week. ...

Progress pretty much ground to a halt in week 39 from my side. Between a birthday dinner, board game weekend, recording a new Crazy Cousins Chat and still feeling a bit poorly from the cold / flu I had last week I just didn’t manage to find enough hours left over in the week to make a dent in Crew Manager V4. To be fair it is a very large task - writing the new code took me no time at all, but going through 3-4 scenes that need to have their components updated to use the new version is going to take a while. ...

Week 38 could best be described as slow… Kind of like the middle movie in a trilogy - more about setting up for what’s coming next, than being a highlight itself. The first part of the week involved getting my pull request with the seaside level prototype merged in, which I’ll go into a bit later as I definitely learnt a couple of new Unity tricks thanks to Sas’s review feedback. ...

Week 37 was a bit of a mixed bag… I didn’t make much progress on finishing off the seaside level prototype at the start of the week. Then I got a bit sidetracked in the middle of the week and finally ended up having to do a 3 hour push tonight to get the seaside level finished enough to move on. 16 July - 22 July, 2018 We’re planning on calling this new level the Bay Of Boars, which is a not-so-subtle reference to the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba by American-sponsored rebels in April 1961. ...

Week 36 has been fairly productive, but I pushed a bit too hard Monday and Tuesday, so I ended up not getting much done for the rest of the week or the weekend. The main new developments are that the troop landing boat is up and running and that we’ve got some explosion sounds now! 2 July - 15 July, 2018 The first part of building the boat was to do the art… after much Googling I settled on this for my reference image: Technically this seems to be a LCM2 landing craft, that is actually designed for landing tanks, but my Googling does suggest that it may have been used for troops as well on occasion… ...

Week 35 has been very productive! I posted my first development diary in months… We had a bit of planning session on Monday evening to figure out what we need to do get pre-production finished and with work on migrating our blogs to HUGO static generated sites hosted on Gitlab pages finally completed last week, I was able to focus on game development for a change. 2 July - 8 July, 2018 Development this week largely focused on finishing off the first seaside level prototype by adding water and troop landing boats. ...

You’re probably thinking: “Wait WHAT?!? Where the hell did the other 33 weeks go?” Yes, it’s scary how quickly time goes by! We have been continuing work on this game and the plan is still to finish it and publish it on Steam before the end of the year… to give you an idea of where we are… well that’s a bit complicated, but hopefully a weekly update like this will help going forward. ...

GitHub Game Off 2017 is officially over for us. This year not due to quitting, but rather thanks to finishing! You can get our game which we’ve decided to call AA Battery on itch.io - please give it a try and leave us some feedback. The last week has been a roller coaster ride with me alternating between despair of getting something reasonably polished out and determination to do so. I’m exhausted now and I think I might be coming down with a cold, but I’m quite proud - I think we’ve built a beautiful little remake of Paratrooper! ...

The last few days have unfortunately not been super productive… I had a day long headache on Sunday. Made a little bit of progress with level progression and the shop on Monday. Then ended up getting nothing done on Tuesday, because I was busy until past 21:00 with a little side project for work that I had to get done by Thursday. Today is unlikely to go much better… I have to take my car to get new tires fitted at 08:00, so I’ll get an hour or so in now, but then it’s off to work until 18:00 and then a Harry Potter pub quiz I didn’t plan for at 19:00. ...