All that Git-ters is not gold

Remember last week, when it was mentioned that we ran into problems with merging with Git? Well, in retrospect, we didn't really have a problem then. At least, not compared to this week.
On Thursdays, we have our biweekly meetings. Before the entire team comes together, a selected few meet with our client and shows them what we have done so far. Yesterday was one of those meetings, and our intention was to get everything we did during the last sprint together in one, nice build. So, on Wednesday, we started merging. Then, all hell broke loose.
If you are reading this and plan to use Unity for developing and Git for the version control of that development, here's a hint: don't. Find something else. Just, for the love of all that is good, don't put yourself through the torture that is Git and Unity together.
In the end, though, we did manage to get everything together, sort of - although not before our client meeting - so I have more progress to show you!
First of all, we have a very pretty menu. It's animated, and it tilts when you tilt the iPad. Impressive, right? (It looks more impressive when you actually see it in action.)

Next, we have a map view! It has been in progress for a while, but its functionality is far enough that we can show you.

Finally, another look at our cockpit! We now have proper models for the buttons and levers, as well as some nice sprites!

In the background, a lot of work has gone into events and network connectivity, and this will continue in the next sprint. We will also get started on crew functionality.

Journeys and Apple and Git, oh my!

Yesterday, we paid a visit to our client, NLR. We met up in Amsterdam and made our way to the NLR compound, relying on one of our team members' sense of direction (and memory) to safely guide us there. Beforehand, we had to send in some information, as they would not let us in without some form of identification, and we each received a visitor pass, which had to remain visible on our persons at all times. While there, we received more information on NLR itself and some of the goings-on, and we (read: our dependable scrum master, Edwin) gave a presentation on our group and project to several people there. All in all, it was both a fun and informative outing, and it was good to once again meet up as a group outside of our usual work atmosphere.

Now, on to what actually got done during this past week. A lot of work has been done - and is currently still being done - on elements of the cockpit. At this point, I would have liked to show you a screenshot that would have shown you some of the progress that has been made, but, unfortunately, Git is giving us some momentary trouble. Hopefully, this will be resolved easily, but it is for that reason that I am unable to share our progress with you visually.

Aside from that, we have also worked on matters pertaining to the server - sending the data where it must go - as well as profiles and the map.

Now, some slightly different news: we finally received all hardware that is required for building our game on the iPad, so we are also getting started on that. It will be very useful to test our game on an actual iPad, since then we will properly be able to feel how our game will play.

Edit: Some of the problems have been resolved, so I have a screenshot for you:

Sprinting through sprints

Our second sprint is almost done, hooray! Last week, we discovered that we had finished almost everything we had planned to do these two weeks, so we moved ahead to starting several matters planned for our next sprint. For example, a small group of us started planning our events.

Now, as this was done largely on paper and not in code, we sadly do not have anything visual to show you. However, we can soon move to actually implementing these events, which is what is planned for our next sprint.

Speaking of, today is the last day of this sprint. Tomorrow, we will have a meeting to plan out our next sprint. Perhaps these last two weeks will have better prepared us for estimating how much we can get done during a sprint.

Another thing that happened during the previous two weeks is that several of our team members worked on compression, encryption, server connection, and the database. However, this is still a work in progress, since we also do not yet have all information and materials available to us yet.

I apologise for the shortness of this blog post; perhaps next time we will have more to share with the world.

Let there be code!

Starting a large project in a good way is crucial. Since we don't have much experience with large projects, we talked a lot about dividing coding tasks and merging to a single project. We finally decided to give two team members the responsibility (throughout the current sprint) to make sure all the individual components, like creating the player interface, event interface and gamestate logic, get merged to form a single, coherent and working project. As a result of the chosen sprint tasks, we expect to have an interesting prototype ready before the sprint ends, so that we can show something to our client and get feedback. This prototype will be posted on our project site and will be publicly available to everyone! 

In a relatively large team like we have, working together and understanding each other is key. During these first weeks, communication seems to be going very well, and we intend to keep it that way. Yesterday, we did some team bonding. Pizza, laserquest, pool and beer were involved. We had a great time. Here is a picture of the menu of the restaurant we went to to prove this: 

High resolution picture of the menu we chose from. Delicious!

The pizzas were really good. Go to Mr. Jacks for a powerful yet subtle experience. Lively ambiance, authentic decorations and a positive vibe throughout your stay are guaranteed! But enough about pizza.

We are currently working on getting some basic functionality going. For example, the player interface mentioned earlier this post is coming along nicely. Here is a screenshot of the ship POV players see while playing the game.:

The ship view (bare bones)

The idea is that during the flight, a lot of different events can happen to which the player needs to respond as good and fast as they can possible can. We are exploring different game events, so expect more on this subject in our next post! Until next time!

Development has started!

This is our first blog post! Things have been heating up nicely here at Turbulent Games during the first two weeks. We started creating a project plan, creating some prototypes, setting up our project space, website and this blog. Apart from some minor irritations everything went rather smoothly. Creating the initial plan, talking with our client, and setting up a framework for development is key, so we take this very seriously. Creating a robust, extendable and usable framework within Unity and C# is next on our agenda.

 To start up the hype, here are some images from prototypes we created during this initial phase of development: 

Image 1: Steering in space! (prototype)

Image 2: Task selection! (prototype)