Thrift! ... and Progress!

I spent my time this month getting Puppygames more lean. Over the last 10 years we had accumulated quite a lot of ongoing costs, some of which now have better, cheaper, alternatives and essentially we could find better ways to spend that hard-earned money you guys have been sending us.

So that that end... we've ditched Autodesk 3D Studio Max and Chaz has been learning Blender, with great results. Blender is free!

We've ditched Adobe Creative Studio and all its various bits and replaced it all with Affinity Designer and Affinity Photo. Affinity was a one-off and very reasonable cost.

We've ditched Unity Pro which unfortunately means no Basingstoke updates for the foreseeable future. The rest of our tools are completely free (Zulu OpenJDK11, Eclipse).

We've moved the server off of the mysteriously expensive Rackspace and on to the fantastically far cheaper and equally mysteriously much faster Linode.

We've moved our database off of Amazon RDS and onto the same Linode host.

The sum total of savings is about $500 a month! A penny saved is a penny earned and all that. This goes a fair way towards keeping Chaz in coffee, wine, and tobacco, which are the three main nutrient groups that he thrives upon.

Realistically we still need to more or less increase our Patreon contributions by a factor of 10 to work full-time on Battledroid, which is why progress is still so painfully slow.

Progress

Above you can see a concrete bit of actual game progress... that there is an actual map generated on the server and served back to the Battledroid client, and rendered in-game by Voxoid in the user interface! This marks a bit of a milestone in the development as it's taken almost two years to get to this stage (if only we could work full-time, etc, grumble, moan)

Next up is rigging up camera control to that scene so we can zoom, pan, and rotate. That should only take an evening or so I think but lately the evenings are rather busy with wrangling kids, dog walking, and generally being tired out.

Something else I've been working on in the background is converting the entire site to https protocol, and replacing the proprietary binary SSL protocol Battledroid was using with a nice super standard https/TLS1.2/HTTP1.1 servlet protocol. That was quite some undertaking. Rather than use one of those bloody complicated and huge off-the-shelf open source monstrosities for doing it I've whipped up a super lightweight little library of code to do it, which is so simple there's very little go go wrong. More on the details of that in another post for those that might be interested in the tech, trials, and tribulations along the way to developing that.

Other things we've been up to are that Chaz has revamped our website a lot, and it's now fully responsive (try it on a phone! ... not that it helps much because we don't make phone games, hey ho). We're working on an update to the Battledroid page in an attempt to drum up more of the necessary funding we need. Coming up with stuff for that page is tricky and somewhat out of my comfort zone. All that "selling sizzle, not steak" stuff.

What's in the pipe?

Chaz is working on some more videos for your delight and amusement. Hopefully out this afternoon.

Brian is almost ready with a big update on metagame stuff for Faerie Solitaire Harvest, before he gets stuck in to the next game in the series, Faerie Solitaire Dire, which is much more hardcore.