045 - November 24, 2019

Hey!

I've been doing a lot of backend work lately making a sweeping change to the gameplay server.

I'm porting from my own poorly designed entity component system to specs.

Along the way I've written a lot of new tests and handled cases that weren't handled previously - so the backend is much more ready for a real player base than before this port

I'm looking to finish this port by the end of this week - and then I'll be able to dive back into adding new gameplay mechanics.

TDD

I've been almost exclusively using test driven development for that passed couple of months now.

Rust makes this really easy because you can write unit tests in the same files as your source code - so the barrier to entry is very low.

I'm interested to see how this impacts the system over the next few years - I'm already feeling very confident about the system's resilience to bugs since virtually every line of code - but we'll see if that plays out when we have real players.

I'm already noticing the quality of my test suite evolve now that the majority of my time coding is spent figuring out what tests to write and then writing them, so I'm excited to see how this continue to evolve over the coming years.

Financials

Our financials for October 2019 were:

Ngrok and the akigi.com email address are both things that I haven't really used too much since subscribing. But they combine for about $20 a month so not necessarily the biggest place to cut costs - but I'll think about whether I need them.

This Week

Number one priority is finishing the migration to specs and then getting started on working on user facing gameplay improvements again.

I really think that the new back-end will make it much easier to add new functionality - so I'm hoping to really pick up the pace with putting out new gameplay.

Cya next time!

- CFN