Holy Penis, a dev update? Does that mean … ?

No.

But I have decided to focus some more time on this stupid game. I am still thinking about what I want to do with it. I may scale back my initial ideas. I probably need to focus on the core of it.

Therefore, my to do list now looks like this:

• Come up with core of game
• Focus on it
• Expand on it
• Profit?

Still, I have actually made an update, look:

See? That massive black hole of nothingness between February and May is what lives inside me. Unfortunately it came out and consumed my enthusiasm for Retrograde. I may have been a bit too focused in the run-up. Granted, a lot of these recent (May) updates are related to the blog side (this thing you are reading). For example, my Arkham Horror playthrough. But here is proof that I have updated the game:

SEE?

I told you.

/retrograde-client 1 commit
/retrograde 1 commit

It doesn’t look like much, but it represents a major milestone for me. I have actually returned to a project after losing interest¹.

Go me.

So what was even in this update? Well, the regular reader² will know all about how I am not happy with how I’ve designed the server or the client, and came across a bug where constructions no longer counting down their ticks, instead immediately showing as “completed”.

This was indeed caused by timezones, and British Summer Time interfering with my UTC stuff that I thought I had already accounted for. After faffing about for what felt like hours getting no where, I decided to just call time³ on using DateTime objects to record moments in time, and instead to use Unix time.

Now I can just get the correct times displaying in the client without the need for worrying about dates. In fact, dates aren’t even displayed in the game at all. It is only needed to count down ticks.

I still have to make a decision on the server architecture, and whether it makes any sense to switch now that I have established the whole API/Application/Infrastructure/Domain layers.

With React I am unsure, but will probably stick with it. I am not a front-end developer, so if you try to resize the screen the whole thing looks bad. I am of two minds on this. The first is that, of course, I should sort that out and make everything responsive. The second is: no, why should I? If people want to be dumb and resize the screen to have a bad experience, that’s their problem. This is a game designed to be played on a desktop/laptop. If anyone seriously wants to play on a phone⁴, maybe I’ll write an app for it.

Well that’s it really. Just a small update about a big deal. Quality of life increase for me.

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19th May 2024