Devops and Game Dev

This is a series of some things we learned while making Dark Nova, currently in alpha.

Intro

There are a handful of tutorials concerning both Phaser and Typescript, but they are somewhat old at this point, usually rely on a full Visual Studio install, and don’t go into actually hosting your game. While developing Dark Nova I found a plethora of easy to use, cross-platform tools facilitating good development practices and fast iteration for our team. I’m hoping this series can be a working introduction to devops with indie game dev.

General Updates – Diet

So Diet has been put on hold for a little bit. I might explore the game in several different engines. The reason it got put on hold is due to some bugs in the map editor and engine that need tweaking so I’m waiting on those. My new approach might be:

• a heavily coded approach using my original engine choice (Valkyrie) where the tradeoff has been more flexibility for longer coding time
• a ‘drag and drop’ engine (e.g. GameMaker or even RPG maker) for focus on the simple design and possibly dialogue depth
• a fancy 3d approach using Unity

It’s a big commitment, but this way the game ideas I have will be fully explored from several “angles” and perhaps a trilogy of games will be interesting as a small packages.

Technical plans include implementing a game state manager for possible events in the game. I am following the example of Grow Island and Grow Tower (link) where an impressive amount of complexity can come from a small set of choices (namely, 2^n states and for any state requiring m (of total n) actions there are potentially n! / (n – m)! paths to it – so I don’t think I”ll run out of options for state paths). I’ll plan out a small set of ‘actions’ which trigger events and also toggle it’s bit in the state set. Actions could then require states to be activated, and different states could trigger different sets of events, etc. A simple bitset could handle all of this, so I will just be implementing a simple way to define actions, objects, and events the character knows about and the paths of events\states that lead to them.

Lastly, I’ll be meeting with DJ to develop some dialogue scenes\paths. Perhaps I’ll use Valkyrie to implement the gamestate idea, Game- or RPGmaker for a dialogue intense experience, and Unity to explore lighting and environment.