Dev Diary

Today was just a shambles! I spent the bulk of it trying to Microsoft SQL’s JDBC driver authenticating to our local SQL server using domain authentication instead of local server authentication. What makes it hard is that it has to work off Linux, so I’ve had to deal with the Java Kerberos implementation and it’s oh so helpful error messages (here’s an amusing / terrifying list). Then I nearly got caught in a hail storm on the way home and to top it off 15 minutes after I reached home the storm hit and lightning took out the power in our area, so I basically slept until 21:00 when the power came on again instead of doing any of the work I needed to get done before tomorrow night. ...

Today was a good day! Even though I was bad and spent most of the day playing XCOM 2, I was able to make very good progress this evening. MegaCorps is now very close to being a game - my criteria for that classification being that the player should have a goal and be able to win or lose. Outcomes The summarised list of items completed today include: Finished UI updates after migrating to Unity UI Squad movement Squad taking control of a sector The minumum UI bits needed for the above to work This is what the new UI looks like: ...

I think I’ve made great progress on day 12 - much more than I expected to! We were planning to head out to our friends for some boardgames at around 09:30 this morning as soon as my wife finished up some work she had to do, but lucky for me the client she had to wait for was very late so I ended up having a good couple of hours of coding at the restaurant where I was having breakfast. ...

Today was a bit of a slow day, but not completely unproductive… I got some new RAM for my home PC to upgrade it from 4GB to 16GB, so of course I had to spend a bit of time testing if XCOM2 runs any better now (a bit better at least). Progress is going to slow down a bit the next couple of days, because I decided to rewrite my GUI using the native Unity GUI instead of NGUI. ...

Today I did something cool! One might argue that working on something of a purely cosmetic nature under game jam conditions is a waste of time, but in this case I feel it’s time well-spent as it’s something I’ll be able to use again and again for any pixel art games I make in future (I don’t foresee myself doing 3D so that will likely be all of them). ...

It’s been slower going than I had hoped, but at least I’ve now started making some headway into adding cyborg death squads to the game! OK, so there’s nothing super about them just yet… they can’t even move… but at least you can see that they are being spawned successfully in each player’s starting area. Outcomes Observe the amazing pixel art of a cyborg death squad agent shown in places where the code has created squads of such agents: ...

It was a rough day at work today, so I slept a bit when I got home, ran some errands and then settled down to give XCOM2 a try (my wife got it for me for my birthday). Talk about hacking, modding & augmenting - that game’s got it all! Hopefully I’ll be able to get back to working on MegaCorps tomorrow. Next thing I have to do is finish implementing squads and being able to assign then at least a couple of missions: ...

Sadly I had no time to work on my game today - at least the birthday bits were fun! Working on my birthday - not so much… Hopefully I’ll have some time tomorrow.

Today was a good day! I managed to spend about 4 hours working on my game and made some good progress. I have to spend some time on my work project now and it’s my birthday tomorrow, so I’ll have to see if I can do it again tomorrow… Outcome I accomplished the following: Finished separating game logic out of Unity (may be handy for network multiplayer if I attempt that). ...

I had a very busy day and night at work so I’ve had very little time to work on my game - basically just the last hour or so… Outcome I’ve started separating the domain classes out from Unity: Created City singleton that will control the game. City contains a rectangular map of CityBlock. Time allowing I’ll be looking at how to tie the new domain models to the Unity engine tomorrow. ...