Game Dev Manager progress update.

Over the last few months, Progress on Game Dev Manager (or GDM for short) has been frustratingly slow.

Recently my personal life has been rather crazy with the last 6 or so weeks being consumed by School Holidays and taking care of my children.

I’ve moved house, learned to ride a motorcycle and started a new relationship in February.

Also, both Factorio and RimWorld got updated and released on Steam and they have been soaking up a lot of my leisure time.

Although I have once again found the urge to start programming again and pace is picking up.

We have made a number of commits to the dev branch of GDM over the last few weeks.

commit 96b348600eb310f6c7ee56cb3033a2a2f62855eb
Date:   Sun Sep 4 19:43:36 2016 +0100
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commit 155d9e360636b53bd0e326050f247cc136838f59
Date:   Sat Sep 3 15:13:31 2016 +0100
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commit e58426414353390e9a04d39bdbfe316346c96371
Date:   Thu Sep 1 15:01:54 2016 +0100
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Some of the recent developments are:

• Projects, such as research projects and game development projects
• Staff now contribute “Points” every in-game day based on Stats.
• Code tided and compliant with StyleCop.
• Moar unit tests.

Game Engine

We also recently found that the game engine we were going to use (FlatRedBall) has dropped support for Visual Studio 2013 in favour of 2015.

This was a huge blow, I’ve personally used FRB before, it’s fast and super easy to work with; but we can’t afford to upgrade from 2013 to 2015.

Using the Free versions of VS2015 would hamper our efforts dramatically without the profiling and unit tests found in the Professional editions.

With this and the difficulty we faced trying to make it Cross-platform we finally made the decision to drop FRB and are now searching for a new Engine.

We are currently testing the Wave Engine which looks very promising.

It offers cross platform support and is completely free (No Royalties, No License Fees) apart from having to include the Wave Engine Logo in the Splash screen.

The Wave Engine also supports the same features on all platforms which makes it relatively easy to port.