October, Just Barely

31 October 2016

It's been a while, hasn't it? So... Well, some updates.

Elexi

So, first off... Elexi is releasing. Finally.

It took longer than expected because, well, localization isn't exactly trivial, and there were also distractions in the form of visitors, family, and related travel. All of the latter pushed things back almost two months later than it could have been (localization wasn't ready until just after that all started, so maybe — but maybe not — things could have been finalized then if that had been just a tad quicker). Regarding localization specifically, that took a bit of time just to coordinate and finish, but mostly it meant lots (and lots) of pretty tedious testing of everything to make sure everything fit correctly, nothing is cut off or overflows, and oh, the 200(!) individually created screenshots for the app stores to cover the major form factors in every localized language. Plus a bunch of other promo assets that had to be localized.

...At any rate, let's just say, localization is a lot of work, on the order of weeks. I thought it'd be quicker, to be completely honest, and I thought Elexi would be ready about a month ago. Making it international probably doubled (conservatively!) the amount of time spent on Elexi (if you include the time spent on word lists), but... Well, hopefully it was worth it? We'll see.

Anyway, go check it out. And buy it, it's only $0.99.

So, How's That Unity Thing Going, Anyway?

Given that I mainly did it for a "quick" test of Unity (hahaha, ouch, I'm hurting myself here, oh God, no, those aren't tears, why, God, why)... Well. It did that.

Unity is kind of a pile of crap — I suppose actually having the pro version would likely mitigate some of the pain, mainly by having tech support, but damn, there are some amazingly annoying bugs that I had to work around that had shit-all to do with any code I wrote — but I'm probably going to keep using it. Why? Well... I kind of know it now, it's widely enough used that getting around the broken stuff is (mostly) a concerted google away, but more importantly, where would I go? Everything else either has worse licensing or is missing key cross-platform support or is otherwise just not mature enough or has any of a number of other drawbacks. So. Unity is it for now, I guess.

To be completely honest... Most professional software is pretty much like this (by which I mean, the kind of stuff I've worked on or with my entire career). Bugs are common, hair-pulling is the norm, yadda, yadda. Profound mediocrity is just the way things are with complex software packages when you don't have infinite time to polish, test, and debug. Even polished commercial software has bugs (as pretty much everyone knows first hand). Unity is pretty bad and often frustrating to work with... But not the worst I've seen? So I curse it but I also shrug. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ 💩

That Twitter Thing

So, I'm essentially putting the "official" Lensflare Games twitter account (@lensflare_games) on hiatus, because I've decided that I don't really want to deal with maintaining two twitter accounts. I mean, it's not a lot of work, but I also don't see a strong case for doing it, so... For the time being I'm just going to use my personal twitter (@doubt72) for everything, and post game updates there instead. Not that I post a whole lot of those, anyway. So enjoy the cat pictures that inevitably get mixed in. Or not. Apologies to my 50-odd Lensflare Games followers, especially the dozen or so that are actual real people.

And So...?

TSC2 is the new thing. That's the thing. The thing I'm doing now.

Tags: elexi, twitter, unity, word game

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