Aaaand it’s time for another blog entry. Sadly not much has happened in the last month. At least in terms of my projects. If you followed my last blog entry, you know that my agency is almost at it’s capacity limits and I need to do alot of coding on that front. So I decided to take a break from DronAR and get some fresh creative wind into my development sails. Which honestly is a tipp I would give any developer: Take a break once in a while to refresh your batteries. Life is not all about work you know?
Anyway, back to work: I haven’t been completely absent from Dawn and DronAR. Dawn for example has recieved a little design update for the archives, although I’m still not pleased with the looks. Especially the responsive code. But that’s somewhat expectable when a developer like me tries to make a whole website design by himself. I still have alot to do in terms of UX/UI and linking. I also want to put all of the media stuff that I intend to upload in the future on other platforms and CMS to distribute the workload better. Videos, for example, will be uploaded on YouTube for reasons of storage and accessing another community at the same time. But I feel like I’m not ready to make that step before my content reaches a specific level of quality.
On the other hand DronAR has seen a rework for it’s GUI. Funnily enough I watched a comparison for what Warframe used to look like in 2014. A great game btw, but the grind is hard. However I immediatly saw my own thought process: Namely how I thought every UI segment needs a box around it. It can look nice but I lack to skills to make an UI background that looks…natural. Warframe had those boxes and decided to get rid of them in favour of a transparent UI, which I think looks way better. My thought process before was that you need the boxes to contrast important UI elements to the background. And yes in Warframe for example there are times where you can’t read the UI because the background is (nearly) the same color. But it makes the UI look old, like a PS3 game. So I decided to learn from other developers and abandon my edge case preparation. Of course this comes with the necessity to watch out for my world color scheme. A transparent UI with white text ist still a bad idea, if your world is also very bright. Luckily this is not a huge problem for a game set in space.
I also reworked the code structure for DronAR. We all know how it goes: You start a project, try this and that and *BAM*…spaghetti code. But every once in while you should take a look at your code and think about how it would look for another developer. Could he grasp your thought process, if your whole drone navigation code is in a single file? Quite possibly not. And besides that you will also run into problems after a while. Just think about the project you haven’t worked on for a year. You will most certainly think “Uhhm…what?” when looking at your own code. It doesn’t have to be perfect, but you should do what you can. It also feels nice to polish something for once.
Besides of the little advances in my projects I have some other organizational tasks on my mind. Like: Do I really need a Facebook account for Dawn? It could be great as a blog platform, so Dawn as a website stays focused on real content. However I kinda feel like Facebook is dying. It’s full of bots and rants. At least in my social bubble. It’s also a question of time that I need to spend. I don’t want to loose focus on my projects, just because I need to monitor Facebook for new comments or interactions. That’s why (for now) I decided to keep the Facebook page, but the community will solely be built on Discord. It’s just easier that way.
And lastly: I will upload the Boids (and future) tutorials to GitHub instead of hosting them on the Dawn website. This is of course another storage question, but it also gives you, the community, an opportunity to give feedback to the actual code.
That’s all for now. If everything works out, then I have more time for DronAR this month. There is still alot to do since I want to make it as good as possible. Even though it’s a small project intended to show what I’m able to do and not a full fledged game. But we will see.
Anyway: Have a nice day! Or night.
