After a BizSpark expiration we managed to get the ball rolling again and knock out some UI enhancements, put together a new level, and take some time for a little play.
Business
Upon nearing completion of our hiring doc, Bud and I decided to hammer out the details by stepping through the process. So we’ve highlighted our talent needs for the Vertical Slice and will begin working those roles up as job postings. We’re excited to bring more creatives into the fold! I’m also excited to hand out some of my hats so that I can be more focused! :)
Development
We have a little bit of everything this month! The most impactful for us was the expiration of our BizSpark subscription.
Bizspark
For those who don’t know, BizSpark is a pretty cool program offered by Microsoft. It gives startups a bunch of free products and services for three years. This includes $150 of monthly Azure credits, which we were making use of to host our website and game services. This is great as we are .NET developers by day, and would prefer to stay in their ecosystem for the efficiency afforded by familiarity. On their end they get you invested in their ecosystem so that you’re likely to continue using it as you grow--which we’re entirely okay with. :)
Three years ago we signed up initially to get access to Visual Studio, ironically it became free shortly thereafter. We anticipated the time frame of BizSpark’s expiration but wasn’t sure exactly when or how service would cut off. When it did happen, it happened suddenly; so we had to scramble to get the website back up and our game services operational again.
Frustratingly they locked us out of our data. To their credit, they hold on to it for 90 days, but we couldn’t connect to it and download it. We also could have sent in a support ticket to transfer our existing services to a new pay as you go subscription, but the turn around on that was a full day. Having just published and shared our last Daemon Monthly, I didn’t want to have service down for a whole day. We were able to get things up and running on a new pay as you go subscription pretty quickly. We do a pretty good job of creating backups so we were able to restore things manually with a little elbow grease. On the plus side, our redeploy allowed us to skim out some services we no longer need which has reduced our monthly expenditure.
User Interface
Last month we decided on our combat UI. This month we gave it a face lift. We received lots of great feedback and have reflected that in a handful of improvements:
- We’ve added a frame to the UI, with insets so things look like they actually belong and aren’t overlapping.
- We’ve moved the cancel button into the pane instead of having it arbitrarily hover over the middle of the combat scene.
- Our resource triangles now have an outline so that you can see how many are missing.
- We’ve also added a gleam when an ability becomes usable, drawing attention to the opportunity.
We’ve also converted the opponents to display their resources using the same triangle method. I’m still unsure if we should be able to see the opponent's resources, but that’ll be determined later.
Abilities
Roy has been busy working on the first of our production abilities. Unfortunately it's a bit of a doozy since it's our first toggleable ability! So he's adding the plumbing for that as I type :).
It has also been a good test case for our new ability workflow we set up last month. One of the byproducts of the workflow has been a list of user acceptance tests that Roy has been able to translate into unit tests. This has made for a quality production prior to putting on our quality assurance hats and fervently trying to break all the things.
In addition, we’ve been improving the quality of our animation captures with additional playstation moves. Though we were still getting poor captures periodically. With a little community help we identified that it was because our bluetooth receiver was too close to it’s PC’s motherboard and was receiving interference. Apparently that’s a thing :|. With a USB 3.0 extension cord giving us ample distance, we’re back in business!
Brookhaven
Welcome, daemons, to our newest level:
Birthday
Oh! I had one of those birthday things. :) I had some friends over and we managed to play some games of Heroes of the Storm team league. Oh--ohh, who’s that?
This is my self promotion, because well… Roy got all the other MVPs but he doesn’t write the blogs :D
I also managed to score myself a Nintendo Switch, so now I too can get my Wild on.
Change Log:
- Added an FPS counter for troubleshooting
- Added new Level: Brookhaven
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UI Polish
- Cancel button relocated
- UI framed
- Triangles outlined
- Ability ready announcement added
- Opponents now using triangles too
- Services migrated to new subscription
- Improved weapon seating
- Added Pause/Unpause
Bug Fixes
- Stopping all characters from dancing the night away
- Fixed object leak on arcing bolts
- Fixed several issues with wheel of fate
- Fixed a bug preventing you from tapping on a model to target on new levels
- Fixed a bug causing a swarm of exceptions upon switching teams in development mode.
- Fixed level introduction on alternate resolutions