Changing User Interfaces
7/17/2019
Hey, so its been quite a month for me here. Not only have I gotten a lot of work completed, but I been working on buying a house as well! First, lets talk about what work has been done. I mean, that's why you've come here, isn't it? I've done a lot of work on Jet Fighter Neon for XBox. Just looking through the list of commits over the past month, takes a bit of finger walking on the mouse wheel. It may not make a whole lot of sense, if you read it, as it doesn't say what branches each commit was performed upon. So I'll try to summarize the work as briefly as I can. Over the last month, I experimented with several 3rd party UI libraries in an attempt to make Jet Fighter Neon a bit more interesting. Unfortunately, each UI asset that I tried out had some inherant issues that I could not resolve, or ignore. The end result is that I removed all such UI assets and stuck with using core Unity UI. Probably for the best anyways, but I did learn some tricks from the experiement. In our previous testing, we were unable to get XBox Live features working, so we had to come up with a design that would allow you to keep your current progress, without requiring us to include XBox Live features like connected storage. To achieve this goal, we have devised a code feature. Jet Fighter Neon now includes a code feature that you can use to store your current game progress. You can use the "Get Code" option to retrieve a code that you can enter later to continue from where you left off. We admit, it's not as good as being able to save the game, but we hope it'll give some that warm feeling of nostalgia. With the change over to XBox, I wanted the game to feel more at home on the cnosole. As such, many of the UI interacton options have been fully replaced with UI based input equivalents. At the bottom of most screens you will find a dynamic display of what controller buttons are currently accessible. Lastly, while I do have a few graphical improvements planned, I have initiated the QA validation phase. This means that I'm currently working through every screen, and every object, testing to ensure they all do as they are expected to do. In the process, I have found several bugs, and will be working on those moving forward. We're also currently actively seeking someone with experience developing for the XBox One using Unity and XBox Live features. If you have that experience, or know someone who does, please reach out to us via our contact form. This is a short term, paid position where the application will be instrumental in helping to make our companies future development plans successful. Well, that's it for this month. We'll keep working to build Jet Fighter Neon for the Xbox, and we'll see you back here for the next update.