September Dev Update
Just gonna quickly go over the stuff we've been working on, and show you some pretty pictures. If you're a Mac gamer and care about that specifically, just scroll to the bottom.
(all the links here are video tweets and the like)
Kookaburra are now in-game to go with the Kakapo, so that's neat! Birb tried to escape (gasp). Also got Budgies in the game, and Pigeons finally.
Most of the work this month has centered around the whole VHS tape system, and getting scenes working in it. That work is largely done, though now I'm expanding it to do more. Right now I can have a basic scene that loads in some birbs and plays dialog, but I want stuff like being able to focus the camera on the speaker, or have the dialog appear in such a way as to make it easier to tell who's talking, that kinda stuff.
The other big chunk of work was birb customization. Added some glasses, got physical clothing working and made a cute scarf that blows in the breeze, and now we're trying to figure out how to make hoodies and vests work, or if they should be in the game at all. Right now we're leaning too-weird-to-use.
Mac Build Stuff
Mac OS 10.15 and beyond is doing weird stuff with Gatekeeper which may complicate running the Mac build of SkateBIRD. We're not likely to sign our build with Apple for a bunch of reasons, but as far as we can tell, you'll still be able to run things by just disabling Gatekeeper or telling it to ignore apps. We directly tested this, just a week or two ago.
We're still about a year from SkateBIRD launch, though, and the new Mac OS isn't even properly out of beta yet, so it's all up in the air how this will look even 6 months from now. We'll keep you updated with how it's all going to work, whenever Apple and Valve stabilize with how they're going to handle it.
This is a problem hitting literally everyone that does Mac app development right now, with games a tiny part of that, so it's likely a solution will present itself. It would seem strange if, for instance, a cloud build solution didn't pop up that could fully sign et al your builds. Enterprises need that just to operate, and tiny game studios could hop on their coat tails and use the same pipeline.