DEVLOG 2023-10-28 : Bootstrap

This week I’ve been in Berlin for PackagingCon (which was nice) so I couldnt do much on the side but I still manage to take some notes to try to answer some of my questions that I listed last week. I also took some of the pauses between presentations to cleanup my Trello board for MEGASTRUCTURES and try to plan the work to do to reach a v0.1 release in a few months.

I followed a way of planning that I learned at HomeTeam GameDev and through other material from Chris Deleon that helped me with planning projects when solo (here is an discussion + demo about that if you are interested in the subject). This kind of planning needs to be adjusted week per week while keeping a fixed deadline, as an objective, where you can at least show some progress by releasing something. In the case of MEGASTRUCTURES it means once I release something I’ll make a new planning with a new deadline for the following release, maybe with more or less time than for the previous release, until I find a granularity where I will just be pushing new versions at a regular pace.

As this is a slow-burn development and there is a ton to do, I didn’t plan many features for the first version. I tried to focus on bootstraping the project. There will be the very very basics and probably not something interesting graphically or ux-wise, but still something “playable” or at least interractive, probably at least as much as the prototypes.

Most of the tasks I planned are either about setting up the game project organisation, with some infrastructure setup for backups and ci (yeah I’m setting up ci, it’s too useful and github provides it for free - I can play the prototypes on linux because I did setup a CI, so I’ll be reusing that setup probably). Or tasks are about the core model of the game that I need to setup so that I can, afterward, expand each separate part, which will bring the game’s features. For example just setting the spatial structure from a model pov requires special attention so that I can build over it afterwards. Basic entity interraction, a basic time-cycle processing loop etc. Yeah I’m not talking about turns anymore as it makes not much sense in this game, although it’s similar to action-points that would act “in parallel”… ok lets not think it that way…

Anyway yeah I basically spent some time just planning, also asking myself some directorial questions about the game which answers you will need to play the game to discover }:D (so..yeah, not this year hahaha). I already started doing basic stuffs like preparing the repository, I should be done with the pure infrastructure and bootstrapping of the technical setup in next week, and will start working on more game-focused tasks the week after, or earlier if I can.