May 28, 20232 min read

Memorial Day 2023

Well hello there! We do in fact live. In the last post, we talked about archiving project SAM and moving on to other projects that are manageable. If you haven't read that post yet, we recommend you give it a glance so that we're all on the same page moving forward.

...but since we understand users hate to read at times, we'll provide some context.

Evaluating Failure

When looking back on our failure with Project SAM, it became apparent that it was too big of a project to start with. We have a small part-time team and no concrete pipelines for production. Those factors lead to confusion and miscommunication among the team which in turn hurt morale, passion, and production. In the previous post, we decided that we were going to work on a simple project to figure out the pipelines that work best for our team and how we all communicate with one another.

The team decided on two ideas. The first idea was picked for its extreme simplicity, "Flappy Duck" obviously iterating on Flappy Bird. The second idea has a small step up in complexity and the team really enjoyed ironing out that idea which is currently known as Duck Tank. I won't spoil that one for you all yet.

So the team went on to work on creating "Flappy Duck" with our own spin on it. Iterating and expanding on an existing idea helped reduce the number of variables we would be juggling. This allowed us to focus on the process more so than the design. Which is what we needed currently. We needed a project to get this all figured out before we moved on to full-fledged projects of our own design.

Progress

Currently, the team is actively working on this project. We have changed to meet twice a week for smaller intervals in our team's discord. We've moved our documentation to GitHub to be tied to the project and easier to manage.

This means there's been a lot of documentation that the team has been working on. [ right image ]. We also created a separate repository that will hold all of our core systems. So while in the image there is a section for "Core Systems" it will actually reference another repository of ours. This repository will hold all scripts, systems, etc that are created under the EVIL namespace that are meant to be generic. This means that we can take those scripts and utilize them in any project. Our goal is to have systems that cover the "necessities" of a game. Such as...

Sound
Player Data Management
Scene Transition/ Mangement
Event Communication
Networking
Base Player Controllers
In House Tools
UI Controller (MVC)

Because the project is much simpler than Project SAM this allows us to focus on these core scripts and start building up that library of ours.

The rest of the repository wiki holds project-specific documentation. This includes both Visual related documentation and Programmatic documentation. Additional files that are too large or difficult to represent on the wiki are stored in the repository under their own folders.