2018 - State of the art
In the end 2017 got a little derailed by an number of emails pointing out that our Torino iPhone application had stopped working. On further inspection it turned out that NASA had updated their Close-Approach database from basic HTML (that needed to be crawled manually) to a more modern API based around JSON. Originally written in 2013 using Objective-C and having long since moved onto Swift and C# it quickly became apparent that we had a problem. As a consequence we decided to rewrite Torino using Swift 4 and the latest JPL Close-Approach Data API whilst also redesigning the UI and graphics to take full advantage of the iPhone X and its Super Retina HD display.
Unity development however did not get missed out altogether, we actively continued our evaluation, completing two games "Jumper" and "BadSprite" in addition to a number of internal tests. So successful were our endeavours that during the final quarter of the year we took the decision to officially adopt Unity as our in-house tool of choice with the purchase of our first Unity Plus license.
Now that Torino 2 is complete and back in the App Store we can once again turn our attention back towards game development. The plan for 2018 is to learn as much about Unity as possible and focus on producing a number of prototypes to quickly iterate game ideas and hopefully discover something amazing.
Lunanaut is still in development, we are happy with the design and art direction but given the fragmented nature of 2017 and our adoption of new tools we need to dust off the old project files and reevaluate where we are at. 2018 is going to be a fun year, finally we are at a point where we can focus all our efforts on game development.