One of the things I didn't mention in my previous blog posts is that I intended to take 8 days of the contest period off from technology; thus I spent days 19 to 27 in the mountains without connectivity generally relaxing, having fun and doing nothing too intellectual. This was part of the plan but I was a few days behind on the plan when I left. Most especially I had not completed the AI work on the game which was supposed to be done some days before - the AI was pretty dumb and it was hard to understand the game well by playing against it.
I did write the tutorial text and some design but probably only spent 3 hours on it in the week away.
When I returned from the wilderness with just three days to go the game looked something like this...
At this point I've got a long outstanding feature list and am already looking pressured. But first the AI needs to work - it took a bit more effort than I expected (and a lot of time to tune the heuristics) but I got to a place by the next day where it satisfied my goals:
- That it could beat an experienced player in it's most analytical modes.
- That in less clever modes it would play in a human-like manner - make mistakes; play towards positions that aren't that great etc.
With just a day or so to go I needed to tidy up the interface and test it thoroughly both as a game and as a piece of software that had to run on multiple browsers, multiple os's and multiple device forms. This is when I had my worst moments on the project...
The responsive aspects had some problems (especially around more square devices like an iPad) but those I have extensive experience with and understand (media queries for the win) and had expected.
It looked terrible on Safari (flickering z-order/backface issues) but it worked and I had expected issues on Apple software (aren't there always).
On Firefox the perspective view simply didn't work - after some investigation I found that google and Mozilla's interpretation of the transform-style property and how it is inherited are somewhat different. With a sigh of relieve I explicitly implement the transform style at each level of the DOM and then I get perspective....but it totally failed in multiple ways - the graphics wasn't appearing clicks weren't working and the lobby systems were unreliable. I thought I had played nice with the browser specs and had no expectation of having problems with a highly standards-aligned browser but could see I had some serious problems that were going to need both research and restructuring of the graphics systems.
It took me 5 hours of hard slog that I didn't really have - several different aspects of the implementations of 3D transforms on svg and DOM elements are understood differently by these browsers. Firefox (probably the more standard compliant browser) really doesn't like CSS-level transforms on svg path elements - mostly around ambiguity about the transform origin for such an element. I had to introduce several more divs for 'rigging' to manipulate the svg leaf-shapes efficiently in a cross-browser way.
Then I resolved most of the Safari issues; for me this is a slow and inefficient process as I only own oldish apple hardware for testing and don't use it on a day to day basis. But I made it work on my mac-mini and my test iPhone 6+.
After that I fixed all the little things (message if the mobile screen is portrait; messaging around players bailing out of multi-player; messages for empty lobby and about 10 other small features).
Then just setting up standard board sizes and starting positions. I decided on 4 boards for the game - the boards are different each time but the size and initial elements on the board (but not their position) defines the courtyard. I played around for a few hours with peice collectiosn until I found something I mostly liked for each board.
Finally I changed the colour schemes a lot as I had always planned and finally had a release version.
I submitted this game to all three categories I wished to (desktop, mobile and server) a few hours before the close of the contest - in time is good enough but not how I like to play.
I've taken a brief look at some of the other games and the standard seems exceptional this year - between the skills that various players have developed and the new emerging browser technology it gets more difficult and competitive every year. As always there are several competitor who have shown amazing design and technical skills that I am in awe of.
This was my 8th year I have competed - it's been a hard year for me but I'm proud of the outcomes.
