073 - Daily Deploys

June 28, 2020

Last week I said that I'd wanted to start deploying something player facing to the game every day, no matter how big or small.

I got started on that and so far we're on a 7 day streak.

Fishing dock Made a fishing dock that will be used to introduce fishing.

Overall I'm excited about this new habit. I'm already getting things done that I would not have gotten done otherwise.

One area of improvement will be to continue to figure out how to balance daily releasing with working on larger, more meaty features.

There were multiple days this week where I made less progress on the Tutor of Science quest than I would have liked.

I'm still experimenting with how to select daily deploy tasks that are the right size as well as how to structure my day in such a way that I'm able to dedicate full focus to both larger and smaller features that I'm pushing.

More practice will lead to more improvement.

Continuous Integration

In last week's journal entry I mentioned that I moved to GitHub Actions for my CI and wrote a bit about how CI is becoming more and more important as the codebase grows.

This past week I dusted off my old 2015 MacBook Pro and turned it into a CI job runner alongside the AWS hosted t3-medium instance that I spun up last week.

The t3-medium was failing to run WebGL and I did not want to spend time investigating ways to fix that.

Instead, I'm running browser tests on my old MacBook Pro.

After some fiddling I got things working nicely and the MacOS machine is plugged in sitting on the couch long-polling for new CI jobs.

Game Editor

CI is not the only thing that I've been improving in response to deploying more frequently.

I'm also getting hungry for Akigi to have a game editor.

Let's just say that taking a half hour to position a bush and some berries is not ideal.

I've done some reading and watched some talks on game editor tooling.

I'm ready to start building.

But in general I have to be careful about any and all tooling work because without checking myself I will never work on the actual game since I enjoy working on tooling so much.

So game editor progress will happen in the evenings after I've finished my daily art work, my daily deploy and my daily progress on core gameplay.

Other Notes / Progress

  • Added the ability to rotate UI quads since I needed that for the compass.

  • Made progress on the Tutor of Science quest, but not as much as I would have liked since I was adjusting to the new daily deploying habit.

  • Added the DurabilityComp which will be one of the components that controls how much damage you take.

  • Added a bit more code generation around some of the quest and skill data structures.

  • Made a few new meshes and animations.

  • Using root mean square error for render tests instead of exact pixel comparison since the different browser WebGL implementations lead to slightly different renders.

Next Week

I'll be continuing to learn about how to best deploy daily while still making good progress on the larger gameplay features that take a week or more to implement.

I plan to finish the Tutor of Science quest this week, after which I'll be working on the final Tutor on Jaw Jaw Island, the Tutor of Eats.

I'll also start making progress on the game editor.

This will be a large investment but I expect it to have an outsized impact on the speed that I can produce new gameplay.

Cya next time!

- CFN