What happened to June?

Here we are in the middle of July, and there’s a conspicuous lack of changelog notes for June. So what happened?

Most of June was spent in an existential funk as the project floundered a bit and I found it hard to keep working on it. Some of code was getting a bit smelly, particularly on the client-side, and I found as I was working on new content (skill-driven combat, specifically) a lot of the structural assumptions I had made early on were proving to be incorrect.

So it’s time for drastic measures to get things moving again. Co-incidentally, the folks at Debian released buster, the new version of their distribution recently. I took this as a bit of an omen and upgraded my server. It went pretty smoothly, and it gives me access to the latest version of PHP, and so the latest version of Laravel, too.

I created a new project, and I’ve been slowly porting over the decent code and rewriting the bad, paying particular attention to the client, where I’ve completely re-written the network handling, and made some pretty massive changes to the display canvas.

The upshot of all this is that the game is looking… different. Better, I think, but certainly different. The colour palette is a lot more high-contrast (and dare I say it? vaporwave aesthetic) and the visible map area is much larger. I realised that what I really want to be implementing is a more roguelike experience, with larger, scrolling maps to explore. So that’s where I’m heading.

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