June 2022 - Week 146 - More Fixing

Summary

• Beer
• Feedback => Improvement
• Network bugs
• Network game over VPN

Detail

I fixed a bug on Saturday and then went out to drink beer with an old friend. Success!

On Sunday and Monday I act on some feedback from Athena. I fix the auto-harvest for farms which means you don't have to manually harvest. I change the blueberry bushes to produce fruit in the first year because waiting a second year was just too long. Stopping plants from growing in winter requires you to do some medium-term planning. I expect I'll revisit this when more crop types are added.

I spend Tuesday morning testing the Mac build and then some three-player network games. I encounter a handful of bugs and more de-synch issues than I'd like. I take the afternoon off to go and see Everything Everywhere All at Once. Highly recommended.

Fixing a networking bug with Bedrooms uncovers a source of de-synching that's been present since tutorials were added. Fixing this and other issues takes me through to Friday when I do the upgrade-path testing in the morning. Athena continues with destructive testing on Thursday and Friday.

On Friday afternoon, using Hamachi VPN, we play a networked game for a couple of hours. We are pleasantly surprised to not find any serious bugs while attempting to drown each other but it all ends when someone uncovers a horde of Copperpedes. There's a design conflict between the single player game, where I hope players become attached to their clan, and multiplayer, where the fun is found in trying to indirectly kill each other. In two or three releases I hope to make the Dwergs more interesting and likable. After that I'll take another look at multiplayer.

There were too many bugs to make a release this week but I'm confident we'll do one next week.