This week has been all about Needle: and boy, sometimes it has felt like we were searching for a needle in a haystack when something wasn’t working! I got to work together with Guido who knows his way around Unity quite well by now as he has worked on the Brittenburg project before, which was build entirely in Unity3D. Needle does appear to be quite a lot more difficult, though. I have read a lot of documentation while riding my trains to and from work: it took me a solid 4 days of research and a bit of weekend time to find out how to address other objects in the scene, or how to set up my animation controller to work properly and be callable from within Needle.
I got to learn that for needle we sometimes need to look further than its own documentation, and glue together a solution for THREE and Typescript’s documentation and to somehow make it work. Furthermore, Guido set up a GitHub for us, so we can work together on the same game. A scene can only be edited by one person at the same time, or we would write over each other’s changes. But this is still a lot better than sending one another prefabs in zipped up folders.
We fixed problems like one side of our box not closing, a weird glitch while looking at an edge (by placing janky ‘animation killers’ within the world, parallel to the edges of the box) and I documented every fix we build into a little wiki. In case anyone else needs to use, then this will be a nice place to get started troubleshooting: that makes it worth my time to research, as I am not simply taking 2 days to fix a problem: I am taking 2 days, divided by whatever amount of people I help by doing the research for them.
I might want to look into building a proper wiki instead of a notion page, but that will be something I can research next week. My web hosting is about to expire as well, so I will need to take care of migrating this very website to another server: I will try to fit that into next week as well, alongside the translation of the CoSpaces game and any other needle projects I might get to work on.
i really enjoyed working in Needle once things get going and actually work! It sometimes felt like this project was too little to work with two people on, as quite a few time Guido needed to ask me what to do as I was already tackling a few smaller bugs. I also became hyper focused on fixing my problem and forgot time, and people: I was quite often not answering my slack because I simply forgot others might also need my attention: something to look out for!
