Version 0.5 is live!

Man, I really felt like I was dragging my feet on that one for some reason…not sure why. But I will NOT burn out on this project! In all honesty, I really try to use this project as a way to practice discipline; setting goals for myself, trying to incrementally work on features, trying to squash bugs, trying to make sure I don’t get stuck etc. Not that I think every project should feel like a chore, but I think every project has a point where the initial fire of the idea has died down and you just have to put in the hard work of finishing. I believe you really see the value of your project when it gets to a point where you have to put in the hours to flesh out the idea that you cooked up. If you don’t actually think it’s that great of an idea, then you let it die. Or you’re not disciplined enough to keep a good thing alive.

Anyways, the point is, getting a version release out was a big morale booster for me. Felt good.

A couple highlights from the release:

Powers!

I’ve put out a couple of posts about these in the past, so you can go read up on those to get the details. I’m really happy with the way they turned out though. I feel like way I’ve abstracted out the building blocks of a power means that I can pretty easily create some a new base-power type, and then create a “ready made” power repo for different variants of those powers. I think a UI for purchasing these powers will be a focus of the next release, and at a later time I want to put some serious thought into an ‘advantages’ and ‘limitations’ system for powers to allow for even more customizability. For now though, I feel like they’ve already added more life to the game, and I want to see how far that will take me without me having to put more into it…there is still much to do.

Houses!

It may seem silly, but to be quite honest, my PCG house generator is pretty silly. Kind of overkill if I’m being honest, but it is one of my favorite things I’ve built in this game. However, it had gotten to be too much for my brain to handle, and the bugs I was seeing were almost unsolvable because of how convoluted the file got. So, I ripped it out into it’s own thing in order to debug it better.

This was an awesome experience actually, and it allowed me to completely redo the code using ES6. I fixed a lot of bugs, enough for me to be comfortable porting it back over to Justice. There are still bugs in the code, but I can fix them later. Strangely, they don’t seem to manifest almost at all when the houses are smaller than the giant size they get to in Maison.

This is a great example of a rabbit hole that could kill the project. Ultimately I think the payoff of having PCG houses is small, perhaps too small. But it was such an interesting thing to build, I found developing it to be extremely rewarding. And fixing some of the bugs were non-trivial enough to merit special mention in my release post apparently.

What’s Next

Next I think I’ll be working on the UI. Right now the UI just has a bunch of stuff that I’ve thrown in to make debugging easier (I’ll keep a lot of that but perhaps only display it if I have a debug flag on or something), and to make testing the features easier. I’d like to get down a nicer UI so I can start to think a bit more about how actually playing it will feel, and I’d like character creation to be enjoyable.