Wow remote work is strange! The past two weeks have been filled with us trying to adapt to not being able to physically work with one another as a development team, and while this is something I find I am already comfortable with, it is proving to be difficult for our workflow as a whole.
I think people are beginning to learn that regardless of our individual circumstances and adaptability, not everyone is able to work in this new remote way. After getting into a solid swing of virtual meetings with the teams, its unfortunate to see that lots of people are struggling with bad remote situations right now and poor internet, make group cohesion rather difficult. But this is just a natural problem of remote work. As good as we may work on our own, we no longer get the physical studio space to encourage each other while we work, and be available for help and assistance on demand. The tldr here is that the work has continued to get done, but its a lot harder to fuse it together while everyone is at different places working at different paces.
As for personal work, I managed to get back on track and worked a lot these past few weeks. I'm re situated in a better living situation, and our due dates for our beats got pushed back, giving us all more time to work. I used the time to implement a whole boatload of sounds that were just in the backlog and had never made their way into the game. This of course proved to take more time than I had originally thought. Luckily I was able to sit down with the lead programmer and we carved out about 6 hours on Saturday to work together, which really streamlined the process for me.
As for the evolving story of getting access to the equipment I need, I have an update! Doing music for our game required me to use Logic Pro X on a public Mac computer. Since the pandemic, I no longer had access to either of those things. But, thanks to Logic's generosity, Logic Pro is free for the next 90 days in light of creators working during the pandemic. And someone that I live with has all of the hardware I think I should need. The only problem now is trying to access my old files from the public Mac I used remotely. I've been in contact with faculty and things are moving, albeit very slowly.
Sorry its a bit of a shorter update this week, reintegration has been difficult, and I have a lot of other work that's been piling up that I've been staying up late to tackle. For the next couple weeks, we will be pushing our game towards a polished beta state, in preparation for our very first release candidate! Its all been moving so quickly, but the end is just on the horizon.
Here's an update video of the sounds in-game!