So BeeBeeQ has just got out of (our probably too laid back equivalent of) “crunch” following EGX Rezzed and MCM ComicCon Manchester, during which maintaining this blog has fallen by the wayside, so this post is a bit back dated and could probably be considered part 1. There’s so much that’s happened in the meantime, somes that’s more interesting than this post but this is kind of chronological…

Started Using HackNPlan

Up till recently we’ve had a few tickets in Bitbucket and a few todo lists on Google Drive, but a game is such a complex thing and dozens of micro-decisions get made but not implemented every day and l needed to be able to track them better (also I needed something I could access on public WiFi which Google had issue with).

I was told about Hack n Plan by Peter Law and it seemed like a good fit. It has all the Jira features I normally use, works on public WiFi and very importantly is free for most features including;

• User accounts with pictures
• Email notifications
• Sprints / milestones
• Kanban board
• Comments on tickets

Migration to GitHub

We also moved over from Bitbucket to Github, the repo was starting to pass the 2gb limit on the sites free plan so we had to either start paying or move on.

Weighing up the various services it worked out best for us to migrate to github, their plan was the best value for the amount of data it looked like the repo was going to generate.

The migration wasn’t without issue though, githubs 100mb file limit affected us since some of our baked lighting assets passed it.

We use a hybrid versioning system for BeeBeeQ. Code, scenes and prefabs and materials are managed by git because these change frequently, have a low file size and are more likely to want to be rolled back. Models, textures and sounds are versioned using a custom system built in Unity which stores files on Google Drive, which keeps a short history and provides massive storage space for these larger binary files. This hybrid has worked well so far for us, there’s >10GB of assets on our Google Drive now not including history which potentially could have caused git problems and especially GitHub problems with it’s filesize limits. This is also the first project we’ve used it on and it’s been very reliable, a system I’d continue to use in future projects.

At some point in the repo history some larger baked lighting assets had been committed which was preventing the project from being pushed to the new github repo while maintaining history.

Luckily there is a tool called BFG repo cleaner, which seems designed for just this problem. It allows large files to be removed from a repo history while keeping the current state. After a few seconds running it the repo was easily pushed.

Moving forward I’m very interested in GitHub’s recently released Unity integration, as managing both git and Google Drive systems through Unity would help keep the separate systems in sync. With a bit of polish it’d be a nice system to share, I can imagine there’s a few devs in similar situations to ours (…maybe).

Added Oculus Support

We’ve added initial Oculus Rift support and are now developing for Vive and Rift in tandem. The integration has been very simple so far but has certainly highlighted that, despite how similar the two HMDs appear, they still demand very different design choices.