A couple of years ago, I was managing a team of developers at Fairfax Media to build the new Australian Financial Review website. We started with a relatively small team of about 6 individuals (developers, designers, product managers etc) using a fairly basic scrum methodology. The build was on a development platform we were entirely unfamiliar with and as we soon discovered, our projected delivery date was far beyond the date desired by stakeholders.
The decision was made to add more team members to improve development speed (by the end, we were a team of just over 20). Those of you that have heard of the Mythical Man Month might be shaking your head in dismay. Fortunately, we were able to split our team into 4 separate sub-teams with their own responsibilities (from memory the teams were “authoring”, “content migration and search”, “index pages” and “articles”).
In hindsight, deciding on this split was probably the easy part. Implementing the team boundaries for meetings/rituals and agreeing on the right scrum management approach was far more difficult than expected due to numerous factors including change resistance and uncertainty.
Some people were fighting to run planning sessions with 20 people in them.
...The first thing I do when setting up Unity on a new PC is point my Asset Store download folder at my Asset Store folder in my cloud-synced drive (i.e. OneDrive, DropBox, Google Drive or other). This means when I download a new package on one of my PCs, it’s quickly available on my other PCs. In addition, it means I get an ongoing (somewhat limited) backup and versioning of Asset Store packages in case they’re taken down from the store or no longer available.
Unfortunately, Unity doesn’t give you an option to move your asset store download folder as of version 5. In order to move the folder, you’ll need to create a Directory Junction
First, move the asset store download folder to your cloud folder on your local PC.
The asset store download folder is located here:
C:\Users\[username]\AppData\Roaming\Unity\Asset Store-5.xCopy it to your cloud-synced drive here:
C:\Users\[username]\[Dropbox\OneDrive\SkyDrive\Google Drive]\Asset Store-5.xIf you haven’t downloaded any assets yet the folder might not exist, so just make an empty folder named “Asset Store-5.x” in your cloud-synced drive
Then all you have to do is create a directory junction /...
Configuring your own keyboard shortcuts in Visual Studio code is fairly easy once you know which settings to change but finding the right command can often take a few seconds too many.
To configure keybaord shortcuts for quick window switching in the terminal, do the following.
{ "key": "ctrl+shift+[", "command": "workbench.action.terminal.focusPrevious", "when": "terminalFocus" },
{ "key": "ctrl+shift+]", "command": "workbench.action.terminal.focusNext", "when": "terminalFocus" }And you’re done!
If you want to mess around with other commands, there’s a list of unused commands at the bottom of the “Default Keyboard Shortcuts” editor window.
Bonus hint: You can add a keybinding for workbench.action.terminal.focus but I find the ctrl+` shortcut which toggles the terminal window to be sufficient for this (double press it if your terminal is already open).
Recently, I've had an issue with Unity spewing out one of these errors every time I try to generate my Visual Studio project using Unity VS. Of course, this caused the project file generation to fail.
GitHub and Bitbucket now both have support for Git Large File Storage or Git LFS. Basically, this implementation works similar to the workarounds below (git-bin, git-annex, git-fat) but has official support from two major cloud providers of git version control.
I’ve been using Bitbucket to host my code repositories for some time now so when I started game development, it made a lot of sense to me to continue using Bitbucket and Git. At the time, there was no size limit on Bitbucket repositories and Git worked fine for my desktop and phone application development, so why not game development?
As it turns out, game development can have a lot more binary content than your applications depending on what you’re building. The most recent game I’m working on, “Dungeons of Rune” is a 3D mobile game built with Unity. I decided that as a mobile game, the 2GB limit would be sufficient. Unfortunately, I was incorrect. Textures and audio are binary...
Angry Bride’s last update included a bunch of additional and sometimes very difficult levels.
It also included an update to make it a unified Windows app. What that means is that if you’ve bought Angry Bride on your Windows Phone, you can download it for free on your Windows 8 tablet or PC via the Angry Bride Windows Store page and vice versa!
Some say the game plays a lot better when you use a keyboard or xbox 360 controller so if you have only played it on the phone, be sure to give it a go!
Not long after the release of the Windows Phone and Windows Store builds, I planned to release Angry Bride on Android and iOS.
Unfortunately, it seems unlikely that Angry Bride will be seeing a port to these platforms due to the cost of the development tools.
If you’re interested in playing Angry Bride and it’s not available on your platform of choice, give me a shout on Twitter (@panetta). Maybe popular opinion will convince me
People have been playing early builds of Angry Bride since less than a month after development started. The feedback I’ve received and experiences I’ve witnessed have helped to shape the game into its current state. Less than a month away from release and I’m still testing new builds out with people.
One of the big pieces of recent feedback is that the game was difficult. Angry Bride has three different difficulty levels and the concern was raised on the easy difficulty level by both casual and some more experienced gamers.
The problem is that I’m so good at the game and I’m not trying to brag. While working on the game, I’ve played it over a hundred times. I understand the different weapons and power ups, when they should be used and their strengths and weaknesses. I understand the different enemy types and how to deal with them. I also understand the controls without reading the two “how to play” screens.
The first thing new players do when presented with the options “Start Game” and “How to Play” is click “Start Game”. From more than...
There are 5 henchmen in the game at the time of writing (and more to come!). They’ve got varying attributes and each henchman should be handled differently.
Fresh henchman who are yet to prove themselves. They’re slow and only take a little damage but can overwhelm you if you get stuck in a corner.
They’ve been doing this for years and are probably only days from retiring. They’re faster than regular henchmen and take a decent amount of damage.
These guys are regular henchmen who only wear the best brand name suits. They refuse to wear body armor because it’s not “in” at the moment. This means they’re not weighed down so are much faster than all other henchman however one good hit and it’s lights out for them.
Chefs have had years of practice in the kitchen throwing things at cockroaches. They prefer to keep their distance and attack you from afar.
These celebrants are tough and fast. Watch out for their paralysing singing and distracting hip-thrusts.
Angry Bride is a game coming soon to Windows Phone, Android and iPhone. The bride must defeat wave upon wave of evil henchmen in order to find out the whereabouts of her groom.
There’s always a story, it’s just that sometimes you need to trawl through Internet fan-fic to find it. In this case, our bride shows up to her wedding with her bridesmaid and father only to find the groom and all her guests missing! In their place are henchmen who seem bent on destroying her and ruining her special day.
The morning after my wedding, my new wife woke up and said “You have to hear about the dream I had”. Intent on exhibiting my amazing husband skills as a good listener, I started taking notes. My bride had found herself in dreamland, dressed in white, ready to walk down the aisle and instead ended up fighting henchman donned in suits on a cargo ship bound for Russia. This dream was random as they often are but the thought of a cake knife wielding...
I'm a software developer by profession with a wealth of both dev management and programming experience.
My programming background is varied and includes .NET, C#, Node JS, React, Flavours of SQL, Xamarin and Unity among other things.
I spend a great deal of my spare time doing game and web development, writing music and relaxing with my family.
Ping me on Twitter: @panetta