I'm going to Gamescom

Hi everyone,

As you can probably imagine, I've been real busy with both developing BMR but also life in general, as is peak season for social-life and visiting family. But this year it's also busy for another reason: I'll be attending Gamescom as part of my engagement with one of the studios I work for, and it has allowed me to make meetings with a couple of people who might be able to assist in expanding the success of BMR!

What I've been working on

The latest update has been taking a long time to update, and the reason for this is that I've started digging up some of the, if not the deepest buried skeletons of the game's early days. This is code that is older than the game has been alive, and it is preventing me from releasing the game on Steam, making it slow, and generally making development less enjoyable.

For those interested in the technical details, the game currently has one database that stores all data, whether it's a character, item, or account information. The game has two domains; the website and the game servers, and the database is stored on the website domain, and every time the game needs to do something that requires access to the database, it has to tell the website what it needs it to do, using what is called a REST API setup.

The issue is that any communication between the domains is exceptionally slow compared to how trivial the processing time of a similar operation would have been within the same domain. Another issue is that the website uses PHP, while the game server uses Node.js, so any system that uses the database for game purposes will need parts of its implementation written in different languages and running on different servers. Finally, the website isn't actually meant to handle the amount of data that is being asked of it by the game server, which can cause instability!

The simple solution is to create another database for handling game data, which is stored on the same domain as the game servers, so the website will only need to store account information and handle login authentication, processing time becomes trivial, and all game systems can be written in one language for one server. This, however, has required me to rewrite hundreds of functions, each of which has had to be tested thoroughly, and once I was knees-deep reworking everything in the game that required reading from or writing to the database, there was only one way forward.

Hopefully, I'll be on the other side soon, and the game will have gone through its worst growing pains. In the meantime, I have been commissioning content from different artists to make up for the long wait. I'll share these in another post!

Thank you for all your support and patience, and hopefully I'll have good news to share after I return from Gamescom 💞

Cheers,

Tinon