Topic: A Development Thread for a Game funded With Bitcoin (Read 4661 times)

It turned out that my collision function was already tested and useful! I also figured out how to use the "debugger" statement, which will allow me to figure out all kind of stuff faster.

Anyway, I solved the bug behind gathering timber. Now timber actually disappear and picked up and dropped, etc... We now move on to add addictive cutting, which mean that if you want to chop down a tree, you have to do it several time! For tree, it takes 10 times. Cutting down logs will always take one time. I did some preparatory work on floating texts so that we can have "TIMBER" and chopping texts for cutting. (In the future, we might have audio sounds for those kind of things)

Also, a lot of thing are broken, so once the logging feature is completed, I will begin to fix all those regressions that are around before we can do a deploy.

Who would think 145 LOC is awfully short?   Now, it's written in coffeescript and I only care about coffeescript. The output might be bizarrely complex for all I care.  
It is per my hacking policy that I slim down any file longer 100 LOC to take care of technical debt that accumulates. You don't want to spend all your time writing them up and making it clean only to mess them up with extreme code addition but you don't want to wait too long to the point that it slow down your coding to a screeching halt either.

Anyway, my output is too irregular lately, thought it's a normal considering that I have my up and downs in motivation.

Lately, the code been giving me hell as I come to grip with old code and try to understand it. I reorganized the map file once again(it exceeds 100 LOC regularly), consolidating collision check functions into the Collision class. That gave me a lot of errors in my code in which I have to jump around to find. Very frustrating since the environment don't produce useful stack trace to use.

I finally got the gatherer unit to look for timber, not trees. However, there's a bug in which it will pick up a timber at the stockpile location and drop it at the same location again and again, which took me a while to figure out.

I tried to use an untested collision function that unsurprisingly doesn't work. I'll have to figure out how to make it work.

Is 145 LOC too long for a base unit system? Considering this is JS, that seems awfully short.

I noticed a file about the base unit system is 145 LOC long. That trigger a MANDATORY rewrite. The remedy was code reorganization. The combat mechanic got a whole file dedicated to itself.  This took a significant chunk of my time out of what I am supposed to work on. The upside is that we get cleaner code which will save me time in the future.

Next, I continue work on the meta system for jobs so that stockpiles can assign several different type of jobs at the same time.

I'll have to divert my development effort to add a small worthless placeholder feature in the game that takes an hour to implement. This meant, the tree chopping with satisifying "TIMBER" notice will arrive slower, along with other gameplay feature that are in the pipeline. Keep in mind that my time spent on this project is by necessarily limited due to low donation. It's a real opportunity cost.

Important gameplay features come first. Next is the tutorial and system that allow players to discover and learn how to play this game. The rest of everything is on the backburner.

Few donate because nobody found the game interesting yet. Some people even thought that this game will never be fun! So my priority number one is to build the big system needed to have fun. Resource gathering, production, military organization, combat simulation, social system, etc.

Can you give us something to do while the H's are doing their crystal/wood collecting thing? Like maybe you can hide some items in the darkness or have us so some simple math or something? I think to have much more support, you need to give your users some satisfaction of having completed something.

It may seems that I been dead for a whole week or something, but I am continuing my mission!

Right now, I am developing tree cutting and mechanism to support tree cutting. I plan to complete the feature with "TIMBER!" everytime the logger cut down a tree. It will also have "accident" mechanism in which an unlucky creature stuck at the wrong location and the wrong time will die in a tree felling accident.

Anyway, I scaled back development way back since people are not donating any BTC to justify my desire for full time development.

What I been doing for the last few days is just working on the terrain system. It's a hell lot more work than I thought.

I also built a primitive help page. It's not much but it's better than nothing. In addition, I worked on scenario reloading to help me test better. The game is now 3.5 Kloc!

Finally. Some feedback!

Status is mainly in the form of crystal piles going from black to blue. The changes is very subtle, so it only let you gauge somewhat vaguely.

I just finished developing the tooltip system today. It let you see figure out what object is on the map, although it doesn't see any description of units. In any case, the tooltip will be an ideal place to learn about how much crystals are in a single pile.

In other news, I did some work on thickening the paths between crystal trees and getting it looks right. That doesn't seem much, but behind the scene, I am really building the proper toolkit that allows me to generate buildings.

Ok, I'm starting to see some logical action of Hs going from dark blue to the light blue squares I put down. I was hoping the Hs would choose closer crystal piles when I set them down but what fun would that be? Glad to see it moving from totally conceptual to slightly functional. Is there a way to see any stats on this crystal gathering process?

After several days of codewacking with the pathfinding, I finally hammered it back into a usable shape. The game now have true pathfinding, HURRAH!

Also, I got started on procedural generation. First, I got rid of the white floors, and stop generating them completely random. Instead, I path to each blue squares with gray floors. It's not completed, and I am not sure that's how I want the streets to be like that anyway.

I should be generating buildings at some point later this week.

Yesterday, I was too tired to do some work and spent most of my time sleeping.

Note to self: no more sugary drinks

No deployment yet. Various bugs and kinks are worked out after the pathfinding system break up everything. I think there's more to fix before I do a deployment. There's also the issue of the algorithm for pathfinding may not be implemented properly. It's my first time with a pathfinding algorithm though.

Tomorrow is video devlog day, in which I will record a youtube video to show off what I been working this week.

I did another coding session before the day is out. This time, you won't see much of anything change, because I am merely changing the underlying data structure. I also started work on pathfinding. Tomorrow should be the day when I focus exclusively on pathfinding. With any luck, we may be able to accomplish the weekly goal list before it's supposed to get started.

I realized that I didn't deploy yesterday. I'll have to change my policy again so that it won't happen again. Also, I will be working on code that massively disrupt the game's codebase, so don't expect new deployment as often.

For today, I added more information in game on how to use it and prepare for work on pathfinding, which consists of adding walls to the game and building a scenario for it.

I also wrote more on the overall development arc, including what's to be expected in the next few weeks as far as development goes.

http://kibabase.com/articles/the-city-development-arc-the-conveyor-belt

Now it's closed.

First day development resume. I spent all my time fixing annoying pixel imperfection because drawing efficiently is a complex affair. Otherwise, the game now autofocus so that you no longer have to click on the game to start playing with it.

Bug is known. I have a github page for this: https://github.com/kiba/The-City/issues?sort=created&direction=desc&state=open

The game seems to freeze whenever I place a crystal stockpile on the edge. Do you have a place to report bugs?

Thanks to whoever donate 5 BTC!

I lost a day in development, because I was busy revising an article, submitting it to Hacker News, and watching traffic spike. Then, my internet connection went down. So I didn't have a chance to work on the game that night.