Wednesday Update #3 (Sundayish)

This will still be basically Wednesday, as I flew to Melbourne Thursday morning for a few nights away, and have done nothing since.  In fact, I was away from Friday before that with family and did nothing then either, so very little has happened.

I did get a few little pieces in:

• Discs under players.  I will get some player looks done sometime soon, however I still don't know that will quite be enough.  I also like the discs under players in AFL TV shows, and realise it's pretty easy, so did that.  I put a 2 colour material on it, so we now havve noticable teams, blue and yellow, and red and black.  If the player has the ball, the disc spins too, so it's obvious when someone has the ball.
• I also added a trail to the ball, to make it more noticable where the ball is and the angle it's going.  It's as simple as a Trail Renderer in Unity, and took only a few minutes to tweak into something quite impressive.  I might have to stop it when a player does grab the ball however, as it's more for when it's being passed.
• I also took a couple of looks at the AI, mainly stopping the crazy running in circles, as it's driving me mad.  I tried to slow down when trying to turn more than a few degrees, and also to be more liberal in knowing when they are almost at a target.  Still not there, needs more time.

Most of all, I've changed the scope down to a total of 12 weeks work, from when it started.  It comes back to an idea from the Unity forums, which is to get something released.  The theory is if you set your ideas too big, the end line can shift, things can get a bit too hard, other projects come up, etc, etc.  It's essentially easy to not finish something, and always have that idea that never really led anywhere.  So the 12 week idea is to get something released in 12 weeks, just get something done.  Beyond that, is yet to be seen, there are so many variables.  In my honest opinion, it may need some support to go too much further.  I'm not necessarily talking financial, more just community support, which I'm hoping to get from a football forum, and perhaps even just from downloads/ratings on the app stores once live.

The 12 weeks will be essentially end of November, and I've really warmed to this idea, as it gives me a harder deadline, but that allows the scope to stay small, and perhaps just to grow as needed from there.  Also, in reality December is a difficult month, so having something out there is probably better than to be expecting to work on it hard.  Perhaps it's a good time to work on some post release work that is needed, if nothing else clean up some release bugs that come up.

So not much to report, but hopefully it's back on track this week.