Busy month is busy! Congratulations Georgy! What happened at Broken Hammer? Find out in our monthly report below!
For the VLOG report, please click the vid below:
As much as we're a game developer committed to Dust and Air, we're a small collection of regular every day gamers who have lives outside of gaming. That said, at Broken Hammer we're extremely pleased to announce the biggest news of February being our lead artist getting married. Members who have been with him since the project began back in 2013, couldn't be happier.
During the last few years he worked quite hard to finish school and earn money. His potential is high and he simply wasn't finding the future he desired in Russia. During the process, he endured a lot. Especially over the last two years during all the craziness in the world.
However, in the midst of it all, he met someone. When he finally left Russia last year and went to Italy, there was no way of knowing when they'd be able to get married with all the craziness. So they waited and as the mandate insanity fell apart, an opportunity opened in February and they took it.
Going into February we had no idea they'd be putting together a wedding within short notice. This was very much a snap wedding and even Georgy was a bit frazzled by all the attention of an Italian wedding. All we could do was tell him to enjoy it. So, unfortunately our art updates won't be as major this month. Georgy is still working but they wanted to take some time away from the world to enjoy their honeymoon and we were happy to oblige. Expecting more come March when they get back.
Due to the sudden change with Georgy, the brunt of the work that took place in February outside from some project 2 assets progressing, was on app development for iOS and Android. Which was quite a lot more work than anticipated.
Android, specifically the Google Play Store, we saw some advancements. We got a functional app across the 150MB limit. However, only audio worked and picture didn't. We still have a fully functional APK up on itch so, for now that is our best option for mobile devices.
For iOS and MacOS, we had quite the month, even bringing on another programmer to help figure it all out. The big problem with it all is that iOS has changed since Tyrano built their framework for making iOS ports. Specifically, their framework was written for Swift 3. Modern Xcode is past Swift 5 now and some of the old code just isn't compatible.
Tyrano has been unfortunately very quiet on the matter. Even worse, the Mac OS Tyranobuilder doesn't work with 64bit or M1 Macs. You need an old Mac to use it which makes developing for modern Macs or iOS simply impossible. However, the Japanese side of the engine's development is further along and has support for newer Macs. Which allows you to do a roundabout trick to get things to export.
However, to even get the framework working, you have to be able to use Xcode 10.1 which means you need an older Mac capable of El Capitan OSX. Which, our M1 dev machine is not compatible with. Thankfully, we received a donation from a friend who had an old MacBook Pro from 2009 that he hadn't used in a long time. Taking that from old Snow Leopard to El Capitan required some Mac community hackery but, it worked.
Long story short, we updated Tyrano's old framework to modern Swift and we have been able to get a test build operational in Xcode. However, the framework needs to have a bit of code resolved. Which is where development has been stalled. Updating some major components from old Swift to new is simply not working well with the game engine and tracking down the issue has been a problem.
We've made some good headway, enough to know we're not far from figuring out the builds. It's just extra work that is a result of Tyrano not keeping things updated with time. While we love Tyrano and we really wouldn't be this far without them, their support of the Mac/iOS platform is abysmal to the point we are considering migrating the project to another engine that can handle it better.
While that is a big undertaking at this point in the game, we'll have to figure it out for the future of the project. Unless Tyrano comes through. They've done it before so, we'll see.
March is looking better as we go. There was a last minute revelation regarding the Mac OS port so, we might get the Mac OS version up in March. Another thing we are looking at is getting the Linux port active as well. There is an extra old laptop we have available that we're considering tossing Linux on. The addition of having the old MacBook Pro around does help for testing on older hardware.
Special thanks to Michael Kearns for donating the MBP. Saved us a bit from having to look into an old Mac!
Alright, that's it for February! See you in the skies!