Thursday, March 30, 2017

20170330 Short session, good outcome

We only had a single development session this week, but it went very well.

This past weekend, the office we use for work, Indies Workshop, relocated from SoDo to Capitol Hill. With that move came the loss of our previously large VR development space. In its place, we must (at least temporarily) make do with a small converted conference room.

With the help of another member of the office, I spent the late afternoon getting the room ready for work. This meant that part of tonight's work was focused on figuring out how to most optimally arrange the room in order to facilitate getting work done, and not getting in each other's way. It has enough space for about 4 people sitting at a table, but 2 people can only just walk around without getting in each other's way.

That said, we found a setup that worked for the most part, and commenced the next steps on our prototype. Namely, refactoring some code and breaking things out into their own scripts (at this stage everything was running in a single script, which was messy for a whole bunch of reasons), and adding the next 'ability' that we wanted to explore. It went great. Our initial planning was way over the top, and we were happy to see that Unity does exactly what we want without the slightly complicated vector math that we had planned for.

Another successful evening! If things continue on this path, I think we'll have something demonstrable by the end of June.

Thursday, March 23, 2017

20170323 Prototype progress

Tonight's session was probably our strongest so far. We've really found our rhythm when it comes to approaching and solving problems, whether they occur during fiddly programming tasks, or while thinking through design challenges.

We have outlined a few tasks, and spend our development sessions tackling them top-down. Tonight finished with us solving a problem so quickly, completely, and immediately that we looked at each other in surprise (and joy!) and decided to stop while we were feeling good.

Tuesday, March 21, 2017

20170321 First day back after pause

Tonight was our first evening back in action since the month-long break for a few work commitments.

As expected, our previously-compiled list of research into 'what works and what doesn't' for VR on small projects with small teams and small budgets proved extremely useful. We spent most of the evening poring over it, and agreeing on a few principles for our experiments going forward. The previous window for work was 3 months, give or take, and since things worked well, we agreed to continue for another 3 months on a few 'idea++' concepts - taking things that worked well during our initial tests, and building upon them.

The evening finished with a clear direction in mind, and we began work on our first 'proper' prototype!