this week was busy, with a few large things happening, and i’m going away next week so its well timed.
bug tracking
the game was sent to a few friends last week who tried it out. it was interesting to see what people did and didnt click with, and some very interesting bugs were found. a personal favourite was a ‘magic bullet’ that by a combination of factors, managed to push its inaccuracy value over 100% leading to some very strange behaviours (namely flying all over the place and stopping in mid air).
this made me realise that i need a way to track bugs, and github will work but i don’t like the ceremony that comes with bug tracking so i made a couple of quick vscode addons to let me very quickly create bugs from the ide which i can then resolve in commit notes via #ref.
telemetry
another factor that became clear is that i dont know what people are doing with the game unless they tell me. i come from support system building world in my old career so i’m no foreigner to the need to collect data. i tackled this in N ways
- added an auto generated telemetry id on game start
- added a telemetry id field to the feedback google form (plus more detailed other fields)
- edited the feedback passoff code to include the id as a URL param, which then gets inserted into the field
- created a simple supabase bin and added a table with some event data details
- added a telemetry global that has a simple sendevent method
then i peppered the send event method throughout the game, each of which are bound by the telemetry id. this way i can tie together actions a player takes with their feedback. i also had it send a copy of the players factory on “combat start”
this lead to adding more limits to munitions. they now need to be aligned with the barrel or they wont fire which is sensible as the primer (or futuristic equiv) is likely to be on the bottom.
a step on the road to better art
the art really sucks at this point, and its getting in the way of gameplay as it isn’t always obvious that two parts are joining with some much gap between them. so i think i’m going to use a tilemap system to fill the gap.
i knocked out a some very simple art of this so that i could test.
behold. a bullet
this particular bullet is made of 3 64x64 segments
that tile to make endless length projectiles
tilemaps are good for when you don’t want to apply art to many combos of sprite, which makes perfect sense for munitions. a group of cases should just assume the correct shape.
the idea is we have lots of parts of ammo art and then assemble them into a sensible shape for the projectile. godots tilemaps are not designed for this though, they’re made to make terrain, so its taking a coax into place.
i also met with an artist friend who wants to get involved, so maybe my awful stopgap art wont even grace anyones screen.
deployment automation
during my fit of telemetry, i decided that i might as well automate deployments while im at it and i came across butler for itch.
butler is useless. dont use butler.