This is the first in a series of posts about setting up “big studio” style tools & workflows to take the pain out of indie development. This first post starts with setting up a build server as I recently did this and it’s still fresh in my mind.

A “build server” you say?

Feel free to skip this section if you know what a build server is and why they’re awesome… if not, follow me!

Unity is great at doing many things, but if you’re in an indie startup… Licences per seat of the iPhone/android kit are too expensive for everyone to have one. This usually leads to a bad scenario where one person has an iPhone and/or android kit and is responsible for all QA and builds for that platform… which doesn’t always go that great.

But there’s an almost silver bullet solution to this… a continuous integration build server.

A continuous integration build server watches a source control server and automatically makes builds when a change is detected. This instantly provides iPhone/android builds to members on the team who don’t have that software kit. An artist can update an asset, check it in and have it in the next build without even opening unity (not very good practice mind you).

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Tony Abbott said earlier today that:
“If I can achieve three boats a year as opposed to three boats a week I think the Australian public would give every reason to be grateful.”

Well…
When making ‘Stop the Boats’ we found it so difficult to stop boats that we set a target of ten boats. If Tony Abbott is aiming to have only three boats arrive we invite him to practice before the election using our game.

So we’ve sent Tony a link to the game, and we hope to hear how he went!

Even straight out of the box, unity is pretty great at cutting the amount of work between you and prototyping an idea. But quite often I’ll find myself writing tons of little scripts to handle really basic stuff. That’s fine for me (albeit a bit distracting), but for people who are less confident (or just less happy) with scripting it’s a lot of work between them and what they want. Primary offender… “Do X when Y enters trigger collider Z”.

So I decided to make a reusable one…

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This post is just a test. If all goes well the downtime associated with new posts to this blog should be a thing of the past. Well… here goes.

The cat’s now well and truly out of the bag. I’m back in the valley, this time in K Tower in the new studio alongside the fine lads of Defiant Development. That and I’m working on a game called Alternator for the ABC.

Here’s what it looks like when you take the time-lapse footage of us setting up the studio and add the funk.

Alternator @ Defiant – Day 1 from Matt Ditton on Vimeo.

I love my job.