Personal Update:

I took a lot of time off over Christmas break just to spend it with my family and work on some Christmas projects. I broke my hermit vows to take my wife and daughter to go see the new Star Wars movie which was really fun. I built a gingerbread 'mech for the family gingerbread contest. And I played the t-total heck out of Elite Dangerous.

Behold the Timberwolf-G:

It was a great stay-cation, but it's time to get back to work.

Development Update:

Last week, I started cleaning up the map generation code and encounter system just to get back into the code. And after much deliberation, I finally have a working title for my game: A Voxel Adventure.

After watching the Force Awakens, my friends and I got bit by the Star Wars bug and started looking into the Edge of the Empire table-top RPG.The game looks really interesting, but I don't like needing special dice. They could have made the symbols more easily translate to regular gaming dice, but instead there's an uneven distribution making a chart hard to memorize. But what really ticked me off was they make a dice app for it and charge $5. I already spent $60 on the gaming book and now I need to buy a couple of sets of $12 dice or $5 for a digital app... Pfft, I'll write my own before I do that!

So Thursday I decided to get my computer setup for Android development through Unity. This wasn't as smooth as it could have been: the downloads for the Android SDK took quite a while and I had to download a special USB driver for my phone, but I finally got it working. I put in a few hours worth of work into it and here's what I have so far:

You can build your dice pool, upgrade and downgrade dice, and roll them. I'm practically done already. I then tried the app on my phone... and it was the size of a postage stamp in the center of my display. I knew this would be a problem but I just wanted to see how bad it was without any thought towards it. Turns out... it's completely unusable. Luckily, Unity has some cool components for device and resolution independence that promise to make this problem easy to solve.

This week I'm focusing on prepping for a game development position. I won't be telling you who that is since I don't want to compete with you jokers to get it! After that, I'll probably finish up my dice app and see about publishing it on the store for free (after doing some legal research). And then I'd like to plan the schedule for my development of A Voxel Adventure so I have a better idea of when the release date will be. The next feature I will be working on will be content generation tools so my wife can start working on the story, quests, monsters, and gear while I press forward with more code.

Tip from your Uncle Eck:

How to open a Capri Sun: I see so many people opening Capri Suns incorrectly trying to jam the straw into the angled slim top. Here's what you do. Set the Capri Sun down and face it towards you. Squeeze the bottom so that the top bulges a little. Point your finger away from you and press it down over the top like you're scolding the Capri Sun. Now you have a flat target that you can stab your straw into. Easy-peasy.

I'll post a video later, but for now I need to get back to interview prep.