This Week At Hyperoid, we consider a name change.

TL;DR

The feedback period for the Project Eris demo is now over. This week was spent on changing the version control system for Project Eris. Aside from that, these weekly articles will be going through a name change. Starting next week, it will be called ‘The Weekly Hypeletter‘.

Demo Feedback Period Over

The feedback period for the Project Eris demo is now over. What does this mean exactly? Well it just means that I will stop collecting feedback for the demo from this point onward. The app itself will still be listed up on the stores for people to try out, it isn’t coming down. I’m aware that it’s possible feedback might still be given even if the app stays up on the stores, and I’m not forcing people not to provide feedback. It’s just that I won’t be looking at it heavily right now so I can implement changes and polish the demo to the best of my ability.

Thank you to everyone who has tried the demo and provided their feedback. It really means a lot.

Merge Conflicts

Most of this week has been spent on changing the version control system (VCS) for the actual project files. What is a VCS you say? Well it’s essentially a system that records and tracks changes to some file(s) overtime so that you can develop a track record of file versions to be recalled on later. I basically think about this as a ‘save‘ system for my files, so if I break something while implementing a new gameplay mechanic in the project, I can revert to the previous ‘save‘ just to be safe. Of course a VCS has many other funcionalities but I don’t want to get too deep into technical jargon and that’s not what you are here to read about anyway.

Up until the release of the demo, the project was using Git as it’s VCS and hosting all it’s files on a private GitHub repository. Now I’m not saying Git is bad, but it started to show it’s weaknesses as the project became larger. Git isn’t really built to handle very large files off the bat and there were many large files within the project. Trying to save these changes at the end of a working session would take very long as the demo release date drew closer.

Since I was very comfortable with Git and knew how to use it pretty well, I stuck with that. But Unity has it’s own VCS called PlasticSCM, and it was built from the ground up for game development. I always did know about this VCS but was hesitant to change over to it because of my comfort with Git. Eventually I decided to pull the plug and just switch over as I knew it would be better in the long run. And I’m in this for the long run alright.

A Name Change

About a dozen or so of these weekly newsletters have been published so far, but I need to say something about the name…

Those of you who are reading this are probably accustomed to the name ‘This Week At Hyperoid‘ or ‘TWAH‘ for short, but this was not a very creative name. In fact it was a straight rip off from Bungie, a video game company, who names their weekly newsletters ‘This Week At Bungie‘ or ‘TWAB‘ for short. HMMM. If Hyperoid is ‘dedicated to creating things‘ (working slogan) we are going to have to be creative.

From next week these weekly news articles will change names from ‘This Week At Hyperoid‘ to ‘The Weekly Hypeletter‘.  Previous articles will remain unchanged.

P.S. See what I did there? Combining Hyper and newsletter to make- No? Okay…

Hyper