Compile Swift Podcast

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 I had been working on a new application, and the good news is it is going fantastically well, and it's now in test flight status.

Peter: 00:22

But that has been occupying a lot of my attention along with working on a new game and also, releasing the Dropsaw game. I'll put links in the show notes for these things. But this has all been taking up a lot of time, not to mention that it's also the summer here in Texas, so it's crazy hot, which just makes me so sleepy. But, also, I have been super busy with the day job. But I wanted to get this update out and just let you know that, hey.

Peter: 00:50

Everybody is alive and well, but we are working on things. So my new application, I'm not gonna talk about it too much in this episode, except I'll be covering that probably in a future episode along with discussions about how I built it and some of the very different techniques I used to build this application, but it came together in a very short period of time after having this need and idea for a long time, ironically. And along with that, I released my game that I intended to do in a month, but it ended up being a month and a half. I basically did complete the game from the beginning to the June, but then I sort of sat on my butt for a bit and and didn't release it. It's just a a very simple the idea was a very simple game that I could do in a month.

Peter: 01:40

It's it's building Unity, and it's a three d game, and it's basically how much wood can you cut in thirty seconds. Now, yeah, it's that simple, but, it's a lot of fun, and it actually challenged me with techniques I had not used before because firstly, I had to remember how do I do c sharp. And then secondly, I have never done, believe it or not, a three d game using any engine and released it. I've done lots of kind of internal fun projects that never go anywhere, but this is the first one that's three d that's been released. And, basically, the work flow was build a bunch of models in Blender.

Peter: 02:20

So I also had to remind myself how to use Blender and expanded my skill set there. Then I import them across to Unity where I made all the game essentially, and then, of course, kicking it over to Xcode and eventually to Android Studio, to publish, right, and and push up to the stores, which also, of course, presents some problems that you have to overcome along with the technical hurdles and and all the, you know, game verbiage and everything else. But it got there, and I'm happy to say that people are downloading it. I did not expect it to be a massive hit. I just this was one of those small projects for me in the middle of the year, but it is done and gone.

Peter: 03:03

And I've set myself a a little benchmark that says if x number of people download and play the game, and, yes, I'm cheating. I'm not gonna tell you what that number is, then I will update it with some things that I wanted to do and people suggested whilst I was building it that if I had done it in the original version, would clearly have way scope creeped it beyond a month. So, there is a list of things to go back if it proves to be, popular enough to to meet my expectations to say, okay. I'll publish an update. I'm also working on my three d version now from everything that I learned from doing that for endless hurdles, which will be endless hurdles three.

Peter: 03:49

And I'm actually pretty pleased with the way it's coming along. It's come together pretty quickly. I'm still building the engine. Everything there is gonna be generated in real time because it's got, you know, it's an endless level. Right?

Peter: 04:01

So I can't prebuild the level. So I'm working on my own little engine inside Unity right now that generates this random level, and it's going pretty good. Again, c sharp. Wish I could do Swift in Unity. I wish it was a first class citizen in Unity as well.

Peter: 04:18

You can sort of do it now with some hoops to jump through, and I don't wanna mess with that. But anyway, that is everything that's been going on. There will be future episodes. Don't worry about that. But for right now, I just wanted to let you know that everybody is still here, but it's just been a crazy time.

Peter: 04:37

And, of course, lastly, like I am sure so many of you, also checking that all of my apps are gonna be okay when iOS, iPad, macOS, whatever, the twenty sixth version with all the liquid glass and the other stuff appears. 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 of you. The good news is for me is it looks like I don't have too many problems to deal with as of right now. The apps are all performing like they should, and they don't look terrible, mostly because I use third party controls on some of the stuff as in, sorry, third party design, I should say, right? So, they wouldn't inherit the glass to begin with.

Peter: 05:26

So that's it folks, that's what I got for you in this one. I will speak to you in the next episode.