A quick update this week as we make progress on the map events.

We managed to define the data structure and get it to read and appear in the game:

This is demonstrating a new feature which is a timer on an event. They expire after N steps (we’re thinking hours), so if you don’t pursue it, it will just go away instead of clogging up the map.

Last week’s discussion about FTL events helped us. In fact, Michel was able to build out the FTL example event in our JSON and prove out the tech.

Today we decided to abandon the Tooling: it’s too much work and cumbersome. And for what? We’re two programmers who can just write the JSON by hand.

This brings up a Senior Game Dev point:

You don’t build tooling until you fully understand the problem.
You understand the problem when you are done building it.

Building a tool before fully knowing problem space boundaries, or how it will be used day-in-day-out, is wasteful and extraordinarily expensive. There is a ton of guesswork “maybe they will need this, maybe they will need that”. This leads to building features no one uses, and not building features they want.

There will come a point in hand bombing JSON where we are sick of the tedium and have a list of Major Pain Points we know will save us 80% of the time. This is when a tool can be made.

For now, we’re using Excalidraw to map things out:

Then we convert that into JSON readable by the game.

Some next steps:

Getting some art icons for the different event types
Creating an event generation and placement algorithm
Getting the Event UI to display, process the event, and close

Small Personal Update:

Back when I had a larger team, I used to read every comment. I liked it and it worked. Yet, there are thousands of you and just one of me, so I’m struggling with finding time to do everything: work, family, teaching. If I don’t respond to your comment in a timely manner, I’m sorry. I’m still sorting out how to do this. Every hour on forums or discord is an hour away from game dev. Phil is coming back in a limited volunteer capacity to help out with community management.