Progress Has Been Made

A tale of an OUYA game

When I was working as a programmer for IBM our team lead used to say in every meeting, "progress has been made". It sounded funny and awkward at the time 3 years ago. However,  I can finally understand what he meant in each and every meeting. It doesn't matter how small or big is a step in development, if it is a step forward, progress has been made. That being said, we have made some progress in our port of Paper Wings from iPhone to OUYA. 

It took some time during the day yesterday, but I finally had the OUYA Unity example running and working in the OUYA console. 

No pain no gain

What would you expect as results from following a tutorial? I would say you expect to have the same results as the ones in the lessons itself. Well, I though so, but after I had one of the examples running, the controller example, it simply didn't work. What would you do in such case? Some times we tend to blame others, and other times we start doubting ourselves. In this specific instance, I didn't know what to think. I follow the instructions that everyone followed before me, but for some reason, I was not getting the results I wanted. The example was running, but the input from the controllers where not registered. 

Well, if you have been in the programming field for sometime, this should not be weird at all. Many times you try something, but special conditions on your system prevents your code to work properly. Therefore, as any good programmer out there, I decided to thoroughly search the forums for an answer. But,  ... the answer was never there.

Life is full of first times

Yesterday, I encounter, for the first time, the reality of being the first person on the internet to have a problem related to something. When was the last time you didn't find an answer in the internet? It could be difficult, but if you search enough, the answer is always there. Well, this time, I had to ask the first question. I could not believe it. The documentation said, that I might have controllers that were not recognized by the development kit (The programming libraries that helps me communicate with the OUYA) and I should post in the forum requesting help if that was the case. Well, I was the first to encounter such problem, and I had to post the question in the forums. 

Thankfully, the people at the OUYA team were quick to answer and provided a solution as soon as I posted the question. The issue at hand was that I needed a new update for the Unity Package. I guess this is supposed to happen more often when you are working for a product that is not ready yet for mass production. After I installed the new package, everything worked like a charm.

What progress has been made?

Paper Wings and OUYA Together

The controllers are working now, but the real news is that Paper Wings is already running on OUYA. The game is far away from being ready; however, the fact that it runs smoothly is extremely good news. Though, there is still plenty to work on.

For example, we need to modify the screen format. notice the 2 blue bars at the sides of the screen, that is because the game was designed for a smaller proportion screen size. Also, the touch features are not necessary anymore. Which makes the menus inoperable at the moment. 

Next Steps

Today, I will be discussing the changes that we need to make with my team. We will cover topics from screen format to gameplay additions. We will be scheduling our coming work so we can start doing the fun part ... development.