I have a working game! 😁

Well, okay, what I have is everything set up and able to talk to each other so that it could be a working game. I just haven’t done much NaNo’ing since last update, just lots of research and playing around with sudo superpowers (yay Putty!).

But the actual story has been stewing in the background and I think I have a solid overarching plot to work with. Time to get the word count flowing again!

Code Progress

I had a heck of a time getting the SSL setup so that the Java/Spring Boot backend on the AWS Elastic Beanstalk could talk to the Typescript/Angular frontend over on the AWS Amplify. Using Certbot for Let’s Encrypt sounded simple… but not so much.

I’m probably going to do a post when I’m all done that walks through the steps, but it turned out that one of the key things I was missing was a domain name.

So now GetPutAdventures.com is a thing! 😅 (Sort of– I added a username and password to the frontend so I can keep people out until it’s ready.)

I’m still chilling on the free tier of AWS, but once I have the first ‘chapter’ of the game done I’ll probably unlock the address and let folks in to play. (Are beta-readers that beta-test a thing?)

The Story Thus Far

I’m a smidge under 12k words behind, but that’s one good weekend of work, so I’m not throwing in the towel quite yet!

I’ve been having a lot of fun playing around with the story that underlies the game and how it influences the new/existing game mechanics (and vice versa). The idea of having multiple ‘protagonists’ all running around doing things actually works well in the story I’ve laid out.

The problem (of course) is that since I’m pansting a LOT of what I’m coming up with retcons some of the work I’ve already done. Plus I think of Cool Shiny New Things as I’m translating my notes, soooo…

Tonight’s plan is to write out the ‘win’ scenario for the overall story and the various ‘death’ points that I’ve got so far. I thought out a neat way for the players to keep track of what other players are doing in the world– but I’m a little worried that it might be too complicated.

But if people can figure out Jenafur then I figure I’m allowed to be a little sneaky. Mwahahahahaha!

Gameplay Issues

I think I’ve figured out how to let folks ‘fast-forward’ back to where they left off without making it overly complicated. I’m trying to make sure things never take more than five clicks from the start of the game, which is easy for now… but as the game gets more complex I’m not sure.

I did also realise I’d need better clues to let players know when someone has done something that affects the whole world. There are a bunch of tricks I can use, like items only appearing in rooms if you’re not already carrying them (the player inventory is stored on the frontend, not the database), but I thought of another fun one.

Basically the inventory system is going to get very complicated, very quickly– but now that I have the SSL sorted out I can get started! 😁

Rooms and Actions

I’ve been working on this since the last update (back on Day 2) so the sudden influx of items shouldn’t be too terrifying. I hope. 😅

Rooms

• 16-28 – added descriptions
• 29-49 – titles/descriptions

Actions

• 21-42 – title

Tomorrow’s To-do List

• Move all ‘secret squirrel’ stuff into the system variables for the front end
• Write a proper README.md for the frontend
• Sketch out a UI that I can access to add rooms to the world without having to do it manually in the database.
• More rooms! More actions!! Lots of catch-up word count!