November 2019 - Week 10 - Binding of the Keys

Summary

• Enable key re-binding
• Pretty in-game messaging
• Legal shenanigans

Detail

"The worst thing in a game is not being able to re-assign keys" - A. Gamer. Better fix that then. Of course it takes longer than expected; secondary key-bindings, key-combinations, key re-bindings that break the game, displaying the keys on the interface and making all the key icons turn this into a 4-day task.

Edindies at Konbo was busy again on Saturday. I can definitely recommend the Welsh cheese-toasty, it's got mustard. There's also a garlic cheese-toasty which is recommended by garlic-lovers. If you like mech fighting games keep an eye out for Exon.

Explaining why the game needs a user's location and showing a loading indicator when the game is syncing are quick tasks. The modal dialogs needed some love as the text wasn't wrapping and the buttons were just text. I fixed that and even handled widows and made a destructive version:

Destructive purple-rose:

On Tuesday I was at Creative Circles Leith to make connections and drink coffee. Custom Lane offers hot-desking and I took the opportunity to fix some bugs on Mac OS High Sierra and test a cloud game with two clients. It was nice to see the game working somewhere other than my flat.

On Wednesday I gritted my teeth, donned my barrister's gown and belly-flopped into the wonderful world of GDPR, privacy-policies and EULAs. The EU GDPR website has a good template for privacy policies and I'm pretty happy with mine. My EULA I'm less certain about. Its main purpose is to prevent others from re-selling the game and to protect against frivolous lawsuits. The part about user-created content is there so I can share screenshots of what people have created but it sounds terribly draconian. I should probably get a lawyer but I hear they cost almost as much as software engineers.

This week I've also been play-testing SOLAS. It's a fiendishly good puzzle game and definitely one to watch out for.

In the coming week I will:

• Document the cloud architecture
• Create a cloud development environment
• Create a new game on itch.io
• Create Azure build pipelines for the cloud game
• ... and release!

Happy delving!