Well, I think we can all agree that it's been a hectic few months. Despite all the ongoing craziness of the world, I'm excited to bring everyone up to date with OASYS and how development has gone since the greenlight process. A few weeks before the current pandemic situation began, OASYS was successfully greenlit by our little college mini-studio, and since then the game has had some significant progress. While what we showed off initially was basically a glorified tech demo, OASYS has progressed into a fully-fledged game. Without further ado, here's the trailer we made for RPI's GameFest:
I think at this point it's important to address the elephant in the room for myself and other students right now. Shortly after greenlight, the COVID-19 pandemic became much more serious than any of us on the team expected. Midway through our spring break, we received an update from the college stating that break would be extended by a week and all courses were to immediately transition to online learning. While we had been relatively prepared for a move to online learning, what we weren't prepared for was the timing. College dorms were pretty much immediately shut down, and many of our members were left without access to the tools and software they normally use for development. In my case, I had to immediately head back up to campus and grab my essentials before my dorm was officially closed. I'm planning to write more about how this situation impacted me personally soon, but for now I'm going to continue focusing on the impact it had on the rest of our team. Our campus computer labs were also shut down, which led to a few team members scrambling to find out what to do without access to the hardware they needed. Thankfully, the school quickly made sure we all had access to the necessary hardware for our projects, but it was a stressful experience for everyone regardless.
I'm extremely happy with my team for their handling of this situation and for everyone adapting quickly to remote development, but there have been a number of challenges. A few of our members have internet issues in their new locations, which can lead to meetings without them occasionally or having them simply drop out of a call without notice. Some members also have less than ideal home situations that they would normally not have to deal with at college dorms. All in all, it's led to a slightly slower pace of development as well as a significant morale hit to the team. Luckily, the past few weeks have been going very well for the team as a whole, and we're excited to announce that in addition to competing in GameFest, our team is going to continue development of OASYS into the summer, with the goal of releasing a polished final version for free.
In the next few days, I'm planning to release two more posts. One of these posts will be a more detailed look at OASYS and some of the tech we're taking advantage of. The other post will be a bit different -- recently, I revived an old project of mine that my roommate and I started a around a year and a half ago by the name of 001 Radio. 001 Radio is a podcast focusing around a variety of different things, but this summer specifically we'll be talking a lot about games and game development. If that sounds enticing, the latest episode is embedded below.