Catching up in the heat of Summer

A brief catch-up episode in the middle of the Texas Summer on the status of projects.

Download the DropSaw game on iOS

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Episode Transcript

Peter (00:02):
What's up, everybody? Welcome to another episode of
the compile Swift podcast. And,yes, we did take a little bit of
a break. I have been super busy,and I thought let's get some
updates out there for you. So Ihad been working on a new
application, and the good newsis it is going fantastically
well, and it's now in testflight status.
But that has been occupying alot of my attention along with

(00:26):
working on a new game and also,releasing the Dropsaw game. I'll
put links in the show notes forthese things. But this has all
been taking up a lot of time,not to mention that it's also
the summer here in Texas, soit's crazy hot, which just makes
me so sleepy. But, also, I havebeen super busy with the day
job. But I wanted to get thisupdate out and just let you know

(00:49):
that, hey.
Everybody is alive and well, butwe are working on things. So my
new application, I'm not gonnatalk about it too much in this
episode, except I'll be coveringthat probably in a future
episode along with discussionsabout how I built it and some of
the very different techniques Iused to build this application,

(01:11):
but it came together in a veryshort period of time after
having this need and idea for along time, ironically. And along
with that, I released my gamethat I intended to do in a
month, but it ended up being amonth and a half. I basically
did complete the game from thebeginning to the June, but then
I sort of sat on my butt for abit and and didn't release it.

(01:34):
It's just a a very simple theidea was a very simple game that
I could do in a month.
It's it's building Unity, andit's a three d game, and it's
basically how much wood can youcut in thirty seconds. Now,
yeah, it's that simple, but,it's a lot of fun, and it
actually challenged me withtechniques I had not used before

(01:55):
because firstly, I had toremember how do I do c sharp.
And then secondly, I have neverdone, believe it or not, a three
d game using any engine andreleased it. I've done lots of
kind of internal fun projectsthat never go anywhere, but this
is the first one that's three dthat's been released. And,

(02:16):
basically, the work flow wasbuild a bunch of models in
Blender.
So I also had to remind myselfhow to use Blender and expanded
my skill set there. Then Iimport them across to Unity
where I made all the gameessentially, and then, of
course, kicking it over to Xcodeand eventually to Android
Studio, to publish, right, andand push up to the stores, which

(02:40):
also, of course, presents someproblems that you have to
overcome along with thetechnical hurdles and and all
the, you know, game verbiage andeverything else. But it got
there, and I'm happy to say thatpeople are downloading it. I did
not expect it to be a massivehit. I just this was one of
those small projects for me inthe middle of the year, but it

(03:02):
is done and gone.
And I've set myself a a littlebenchmark that says if x number
of people download and play thegame, and, yes, I'm cheating.
I'm not gonna tell you what thatnumber is, then I will update it
with some things that I wantedto do and people suggested
whilst I was building it that ifI had done it in the original
version, would clearly have wayscope creeped it beyond a month.

(03:26):
So, there is a list of things togo back if it proves to be,
popular enough to to meet myexpectations to say, okay. I'll
publish an update. I'm alsoworking on my three d version
now from everything that Ilearned from doing that for
endless hurdles, which will beendless hurdles three.

(03:49):
And I'm actually pretty pleasedwith the way it's coming along.
It's come together prettyquickly. I'm still building the
engine. Everything there isgonna be generated in real time
because it's got, you know, it'san endless level. Right?
So I can't prebuild the level.So I'm working on my own little
engine inside Unity right nowthat generates this random

(04:09):
level, and it's going prettygood. Again, c sharp. Wish I
could do Swift in Unity. I wishit was a first class citizen in
Unity as well.
You can sort of do it now withsome hoops to jump through, and
I don't wanna mess with that.But anyway, that is everything
that's been going on. There willbe future episodes. Don't worry

(04:30):
about that. But for right now, Ijust wanted to let you know that
everybody is still here, butit's just been a crazy time.
And, of course, lastly, like Iam sure so many of you, also
checking that all of my apps aregonna be okay when iOS, iPad,
macOS, whatever, the twentysixth version with all the

(04:53):
liquid glass and the other stuffappears. Making sure that that's
okay before the time gets here,that's a priority of course, as
I'm sure it is for so many ofyou. The good news is for me is
it looks like I don't have toomany problems to deal with as of
right now. The apps are allperforming like they should, and

(05:13):
they don't look terrible, mostlybecause I use third party
controls on some of the stuff asin, sorry, third party design, I
should say, right? So, theywouldn't inherit the glass to
begin with.
So that's it folks, that's whatI got for you in this one. I
will speak to you in the nextepisode.