This Week’s Dev Ramble
This week, I don’t really have one big concrete subject to talk about.
No grand lesson.
No dramatic breakthrough.
No “I stared into the soul of game development and came back changed” moment.
So instead, I’m just going to do what every slightly overloaded developer does best: list out the chaos and pretend it was a plan.
Awesome Task Manager
I’m still waiting for the Unity Asset Store to review and publish Awesome Task Manager.
At this stage, it has been so long since I first uploaded the project that the version sitting in review is starting to feel like an ancient artefact. Since submitting it, I’ve added several new features that weren’t there at the start, with most of them being added in just the past seven days.
The wait has been rough, I won’t lie. I’m still only at number 207 in the queue, so it looks like I’ll be camping here for a little while longer.
That said, I really do hope people enjoy it when it finally goes live. I’ve put a serious amount of work into it over the last few weeks, and it has grown from a handy little Unity tool into something I’m genuinely proud of.
So now I wait.
Patiently.
Calmly.
Definitely not refreshing the queue every few minutes like a gremlin.
My Bowling Prototype
I’ve also been working on my bowling prototype.
Right now, the main job is getting the AI to actually shoot the ball, which sounds simple enough until you remember this is game development, where “make thing move forward” can somehow become a three-hour investigation.
The funny part is that I borrowed the code from a rock-skipping minigame I made before. So now I’m trying to figure out why it worked perfectly in one project, but in this one it has decided to forget its entire purpose in life.
Once I get that sorted, I should be in a good place to start testing some more fun and interesting systems. That’s the part I’m looking forward to most: getting past the awkward technical setup and into the stage where the prototype can actually start proving whether there’s a fun game hiding inside it.
Colun
I’ve also helped out with Colun this week.
I’ve been going through the project minigame by minigame and noting down most of the art assets we still need in order to get a demo build into the hands of players.
I’ve also been working on completing some of the minigames that other people started but didn’t get a chance to finish. It has been nice jumping between different parts of the project and helping push things closer to something playable.
Indie Game Clinic Game Jam
I’m also really excited to take part in the Indie Game Clinic game jam, which starts on Sunday.
My goal for this one is to make something extremely simple. Dangerously simple. Suspiciously simple. I want to aim for a game that I can finish in two or three days. The plan is to keep the scope tiny, finish something playable, and hopefully make it good.
Mostly, I’m just excited to try.
So yeah, that’s been the week.
A bit of waiting.
A bit of debugging.
A bit of asset planning.
A bit of finishing other people’s loose ends.
And soon, a fresh game jam to throw myself into.
Not bad. Not calm. But definitely productive.