Hey Folks! I'm typing this in front of an impressive stack of boxes from the new Blue Bottle Games, LLC headquarters: the basement of our new house!
Unfortunately, I literally only have the PC's basics hooked-up so far, and plenty of unpacking yet to do. Also, I am as far from the cable outlet as humanly possible in this house, meaning I'm on a tenuous wifi connection. Quite the step down from the old hard-wired connection. Might be time to upgrade to a better wifi router and adapter.
Hey Folks! Spent a good chunk of the day working on updated sprites for mobile items, as well as checking out video-Josh's first draft of the trailer!
Even though it's just a first draft, the trailer is already impressive. I was surprised at how intense it was. One of the goals we were hoping to hit in the piece was a sense of gravity, and man, we hit it. I'm even a little concerned it might be too strong!
Hey Folks! More loose ends tying-up today, plus a hardware upgrade!
The hardware maybe isn't too exciting to anyone but me. It's a 1TB solid-state drive (SSD) for my work PC. But since my old 500GB SSD was 90% full, space was getting tight. And recording game footage was making this painfully obvious!
Hey Folks! Bit of a mixed-bag today, as I tied-up some loose ends.
One of the top priorities was to get some game footage to Josh (trailer producer) for cutting into the trailer. Yesterday's tests left us with some workable settings for capturing mobile game footage, and I had about 5 files to upload. Some crafting, map movement, freezing, bandaging, scavenging, and combat. There's still more to record from our wishlist, but this is a good start, and gives him a chance to test drive the footage for issues.
Hey Folks! Mostly another day of trailer prep, here, as Josh and I work out the best way for me to record in-game footage, and we read through the script with Nelson and Phil.
The game footage was a bit of a mystery at first, as no matter what settings or codecs I used, it seemed to have compression artifacts. Even lossless settings at 7GB per minute!
NEO Scavenger is now officially updated to v1.15! Since the test builds have been relatively stable, I've just finished updating the default builds to 1.15 on all sites. The "test" links are no longer necessary, and have been removed for now.
Hey Folks! Feeling a bit worn out today by taxes and mobile issues. But at least there's one glimmer of good news: the website is just about done!
I'm currently reviewing the last handful of fixes from the developers, and after that, it's just migrating email services from the old to new providers And then...launch the new site, I guess?
I might want to wait and see if there's a way to time it with the mobile launch. But it might also just be good to get it over with so the kinks are worked-out before more visitors come. Hmm.
Hey Folks! Hope everyone enjoyed their weekend. Ours was yet another one of cleaning and repairing the new house, as will likely be the case with many future weekends :)
Today was a bit of an oddball in that I spent most of it out "in the field." Namely, sourcing props and costume items for the new trailer!
Hey Folks! Been quietly working on some more code the past couple of days. I managed to carve out almost a day and a half of coding to work on the remaining leaderboards for mobile.
It was fairly straightforward stuff. I needed a few bits of info from Tiago, but most of the lifting was formatting the data to the (sometimes different) types needed by Google and Apple. That, and setting up the receiving end on the relevant game centers with names, units, display formats, and unique IDs.
Hey Folks! As many of you know, I'll be launching the iOS and Android versions of NEO Scavenger soon. And along with it, a new and improved NEO Scavenger trailer!
Hey Folks! The parade of management tasks continues today. And despite getting to work a bright and early 1.5 hours early (thanks baby daughter!), I still managed to go a complete day without being caught-up.
Like, in a code editor and photoshop, with debugger and config files and everything!
Actually, let me back up and apologize for yesterday's lapse in blog posts. Something I ate Wednesday decided that night it wanted to be un-eaten, and spent the next 16 hours in a staring contest with me. After a day-long diet of almost only water, it finally won, and I was able to start eating solid foods again. Interestingly, the only remaining symptoms today appear to be muscle fatigue from the vomiting. I chalk it up to an Alien: Covenant publicity stunt.
Hey Folks! Today was a whirlwind of activity, as more management tasks came to important junctures.
First of all, I saw the new website! Like, the actual living, breathing new site. And it looks pretty good!
It's still Blue Bottle Games. And it still has pretty much the same pages and structure. But it's been streamlined a bit, polished, and a few areas reorganized, particularly with an eye towards more games in the future.
