A screenshot from a puzzle in Lake Ridden, still a lot of work in progress.
I’m Johan, the CTO and Creative director of Midnight Hub and Lake Ridden. Today I’m going to talk about a tool I made which makes it easier for the team to quickly access and play the latest version of Lake Ridden. This without opening Unity or update the project files. No more going around asking team member if they have anything more to commit before you manually make a build of the game!
Concept art in the makening for Lake Ridden.
The benefit of not needing to build the game every time someone wants feedback on a feature is probably obvious to anyone making games: it saves the team huge amounts of time! We also integrated testing to make sure that the game is building okay and working as expected at all times.
Our art director, Erik, making cool art for Lake Ridden!
When we submit a new commit to Plastic SCM, that commit is immediately picked up by TeamCity and automatically built. In our tool, we access the TeamCity API and get the status, submitter, change id and comment for all builds.
Always testing, using the release version, has also been very helpful for us since we often take shortcuts in the editor to speed up our workflows doesn’t always work in release. It is also nice that Sara, our producer who usually doesn’t work with Unity, can immediately test a new version.
A screenshot of our download tool which makes it easy to access and play the latest version of the game.
Currently, our plan is to make a second iteration of the entire game, we just finished the first iteration of the whole game before the summer. We pretty much have all functionality in the game at the moment and a lot of temp art. I think It’s a super interesting and fun way of working since we produce lots of content in a very short time period.
All the post-its from the pre-production of Lake Ridden!
Early 3D modells of the vegetation in the game. This was made during pre-production to help find our art style for the game.
To sum up, having a download tool is awesome and we are making progress! Hit follow on our Twitter or Facebook to stay up to date with Lake Ridden! I hope this post got your some nice ideas on how to spend less time on making builds for your games!
Cheers,
Johan & The Team
