Indies Vs Gamers 2015 and the importance of a good repository

So I have assembled a team and have entered the Indies vs Gamers, hosted by GameJolt. Our game can be found here.

This team was set up very short notice, and I had made an assumption. Because my teammates are all in different locations, we would need some form of Subversion. My assumption was that my teammates knew how to use Git to some level. So the night before the Jam started, I created an empty project on my GitHub, made the initial empty push, and went to bed with some level of preparedness. When the next day came and we had our meeting, a mere hour before the Jam theme was announced, I discovered none of the other members knew how to Git. A slight problem.

So, in that one hour time span, we attempted to setup a different SVN. It was all for naught, as none of us knew how to setup any others. The list we looked through was TortoiseSVN and VisualSVN. Visual looked like it would be the easiest to setup, but with less than half an hour at that point and everyone wanting to get started, we decided on the fallback option that a few of us knew we didn't really want to use. Dropbox.

Dropbox is NOT a SVN substitute. Only 1 person can really work at a time effectively. If 2 people are in a scene, Unity's backend files will mess with the other person's work. For example, I was working in the Main Menu scene, and a teammate was in a level scene. I swapped from Unity to Mono, changed a script, came back, and my scene had been replaced with everything in the other scene, but was still technically my scene. Had to restart Unity. Another problem, if a teammate has any errors in a script, you cannot run the editor because that error will prevent you. And if you fix it and save the script so YOU can work, your save completely overwrote everything your partner had done since his last save. It's a mess.

There may be someway to make working in DB easier, but I do not know it. If anyone reading this happens to know a way to setup a simple repository on a windows laptop that select outside users could get in and work with me, let me know. Or, if you know of a good GitHub tutorial, that will also suffice.

Now for the Jam. The theme is Arcade, so the game we are making is called Meta Arcade, or METARCADE. You control a person in an arcade, For the jam, we are probably only going to make one game in the arcade, but it will be the main game. If I have time Sunday night, I will make a small mini game to put in as well. I will probably do that as well, but after the Jam. I've had the idea for this type of game for a while, and now that I've looked at the GameJolt API, it seems like that would be the best place to host it for a number of reasons.

I might put more down later, but I should really get back to the Jam :p

Later all
-Monte

BrickBreaker Clone Update

I did it! The Brick Break clone can be found on GameJolt. It's not totally complete, but there is a working version up and running.

The project took ~48 hours. It is a very simple game: 3 lives, 1 play mode, no HUD. I realized after putting it up that I forgot to enable the trophies... I'll probably do that at some point in the future. If literally anyone asks me too, I might go back and finish the other modes too ;)

The entire point of the project was to practice with the GameJolt API and setting up their scoreboards. After realizing that the old tutorials were virtually worthless for API 2.0, it took some documentation digging. But I got all of the scoreboards working in one day, so it wasn't to bad. I consider this little experiment a success.

Hello World!

Hello World!

Now that I know it's working, I can type!

This is going to be a place for me to post about what I am working on. I've got a few projects in my queue right now. All in Unity, because I like Unity!

They are:

Racer

Brick Buster

and a Card Game

For now, I am working on Racer and BrickBuster. Which is probably a shame, because Card Game is pretty far along from being complete, but I hit a snag and got very, VERY angry at it. And as far I remember, it is the only issue I remember having with it. But the issue causes the game to be unplayable, so on the back log it goes.

I'll keep updates posted, hopefully on a semi regular basis. Weekends look like a good time to do so. But other updates might show up at some point.

Next weekend, however, I hope to be participating in the Indies vs Gamers game jam. That's why I started the Brick Buster so suddenly, so I could have something simple to test their API with. So, Brick Buster takes priority for now.

More updates later, as I'm just going back to the grind for now. See ya'