Grumpy Gamer

If you haven’t read my previous post about Death By Scrolling way back in February, I suggest you do.

Of course this is my lazy way of doing the 2nd promised blog post for Death By Scrolling.

In all fairness, I started to write it and it seem awfully familiar so I went back and checked and sure enough I had already written about it.

But, I’ll do another real post…

I asked for beta testers on Mastodon and got close to 300 sign-ups. I didn’t want to invite everyone all at once. There is an old saying that you can only make a first impression once.

Every time I make a new beta version I invite 25 more people.

Couple of stats:

About 25% of the people never redeem the steam key. Or they redeem it weeks later. This is a little surprising, but maybe it shouldn’t be. People are busy.

Of the people who did redeem the key a third play the game once or twice and never again. This is not surprising. Death By Scrolling is a rogue-like and you die a lot. I do mean a lot, it’s right in the title. Some people do not like this type of game, and I’m OK with that.

Maybe half the people who play the game never visit the Discord. We can get only so much info from analytics. Having a conversation about what you like and don’t like is very helpful. Again, this isn’t too unexpected.

The players that do play more than a few times play a lot and that is good to see. It’s nice to see strategies emerge that we, as the designers, didn’t think of. That is always a good sign.

This is the first time I’ve done large-ish beta test for one of my games and it’s been fascinating and very insightful.

I’m about to invite the next group of 25 testers. If you’re among this group, please visit the Discord.

– Ron

I miss the Kickstarter days of Thimbleweed Park where each week I would write a blog post about how things were going and we’d to a podcast. If we were doing Thimbleweed Park today we’d have a video podcast on YouTube.

I watch a lot of YouTube videos from indie game devs where they document everything they are doing on their game with a fancy video and my first thought is: “Where do you find the time to make this”. I barely have enough time to work on my game.

Now that Death By Scrolling is getting close to releasing, I really should start blogging again about the game. There are a lot of interesting things happening and there is no reason I should keep those to myself.

I have found that as I get older I enjoy pontificating less and less. I’ve stopped doing talks, doing interviews and podcasts. I really enjoy Tim Cain YouTube channel but I could never do that. It’s not that I don’t have anything to say, it’s that I have become self-conscious that I’m just pontificating for no reason and don’t have anything deep and interesting to say.

Now that I’ve got you all primed and ready, starting next week you can plan your day around the Death By Scrolling blog update.

Or maybe I’ll delete this post like it never happened.

^^^ this

When I build my game for testing, it’s a completely automated process from the command line.

I type pub.sh --test on the command line and a long chain of events is started.

The script pushes to git, which starts the cloud based CI machine (Azure) building the Mac, Windows and Linux executables.

When they are done, my local script is notified and they are download locally.

Game files are added and they are signed and packaged up.

The script then logs into Steam and uploads the game.

A change list is built from the git log and uploaded to a private website.

When that is complete, a message is sent to Discord to notify testers that the build is done.

This is all done with no interaction on my part.

It makes doing test builds quick, easy, and painless. But more important is there is no human interaction, so there is less chance of a mistake being made.

To upload to Steam you need to authenticate, which usually involves getting an email and typing in a code or doing the same with their authentication app. It’s not very conducive to automated builds.

Fortunately Steam has an process where you authenticate once and then pass a token from the command line and that logs you in without a password. Wonderful.

This worked fine for what seem like years, then on Jan 1, 2025 I got a error saying my token was expired. OK, makes some sense.

I re-ran the process to get a new token and everything was fine for a day or so, then it failed again saying the token was expired. Then it happened again. And again.

Frustrated, I reached out to the friend who works at Valve and was put in contact with a programmer there. He watched the back-end and said everything was fine for the first few auths and then the old expired token as submitted. Rebuilding the token worked for a while and then the old token was submitted again.

We began to suspect the token file on my machine was being overwritten but I couldn’t see it happening and didn’t know how it was happening. It not like the whole directory was being restored from a backup, it was just that one file sitting in an obscure Steam folder.

We tried everything and never solved the problem.

The solution I finally arrive at – and has worked fine for the past three months – was to get an auth token and then save that file away. Just before my script uploads to Steam it copies that good file over the current one and uploads. This is what Steam recommends for full CI builds, but until Jan 1, I never had to do this locally.

I’m still mystified who is overwriting that file but I guess it’s moot now.

Going on n+1 years, I proclaim grumpygamer.com to be 100% April Fools’ Day joke free.

I realized that I lost a large chunk of the early April Fools’ posts due to moving content from one back-end to another over time. It pains me as I’m sure they are seen as culturally significant and worth preserving for future generations.

“Grandpa! Tell us the story of when the web used be be April Fools’ joke free!”

I might have to go track them down on the Wayback Machine and pretend it all never happened and I have perfect back-up and archiving practices.

First screen shot from my new game called Death by Scrolling.

I started working on this game back in 2019. It started out great and everybody I showed it to loved it, but it was simple. Everyone asked for progression and “game” stuff and over the next six months I proceeded to ruin it.

Then a little game called Return to Monkeys island came along and I took the next two years to build that with Dave Grossman and a wonderful team.

Monkey Island ended and I started working on a new game I dubbed “RPGTBD”. It was a classic Zelda-like pixel art RPG and was a lot of fun. I brought on an artist (Craig) and a designer (Elissa) to help.

When I first started RPGTBD everyone told me that it’s unrealistic to do a open world RPG with a small team. Morons. What do they know?

Well, a lot actually.

It became obvious that my vision for the game was never going to get done and on top of that I was spending a lot of money so something had to give. I could pay off the contracts for Craig and Elissa and call it a day.

But I had all this wonderful art and a nice quest and exploration system from RPGTBD it felt odd to let them go to waste.

Then I remembered Death By Scrolling. I shared the prototype with Elissa and she really liked it. There is something about the game that I could never let go of.

I rebuilt the whole project, stripping out all the stupid stuff and returned it to the core of the game back when it was fun.

Over the next 3 months Elissa and I added back pieces bit-by-bit with a nice progression system, story, quests and challenges.

It’s not going to be everybody’s cup of tea, but Elissa and I get lost in playing it when we should be testing a new feature, so I guess that’s good.

ELissa and Craig leave the project on March 1 then it’s just me for a few months and then release it in 2025.

This time for sure.

I recently asked on Mastodon how a player would expect damage to be computed in an RPG.

(base_damage + extra_damage) * damage_buff

or

(base_damage * damage_buff) + extra_damage

General consensus is there was no consensus.

The one thing people did agree on was that the skill/weapon description should say what the order of operation is.

Fair enough.

I am worried about the amount of information that needs to be conveyed to players. The game needs to work well on the Switch and the Steam Deck with limited screen size. I play a lot of games where the 20-something devs with perfect eyesight spent too much time looking at the game on a large monitor. I’ve purposely kept the text large enough to read on a small screen. It means I need to be succinct.

Some people suggested that players should be able to order the weapons/skills as they wanted. This is problematic since weapons/skills come in a very random order and a UI to reorder them seems like a lot of work and not really what the game is about.

It also doesn’t matter what order the weapons/skills are evaluated. I compute damage_buff then compute damage_extra when the weapon/skill is acquired. Later on those are used to compute damage and that is where the order matters.

It’s also basically an action game and players shouldn’t get too deep into stat management for a character that is going to last a few minutes.

Maybe I’m wrong about that.

I think I will opt for the 1st method since it allows for bigger numbers and that is something players do want.

I’m a big fan of Tim Cane’s YouTube channel.

If I was going to have a YouTube channel, I would want it to be like his but talking about adventure games, not RPGs. Maybe someday.

So imagine my delight when he posted this:

Clayton and I wrote this poem many years ago, but not much as changed.

I’ve never met Tim Cane but hope to someday. Maybe he will come to New Zealand.

!! P.S. Static site is now live on grumpygamer.com !!

I spent the last weekend converting grumpygamer.com to a static website using Hugo.

I don’t really know why. The old dynamic site was working fine.

It’s still hosted it on my server but there is no php, etc. I may move it to a static site hosting platform.

If your reading this, you’re on the new static site.

So far Hugo has been great. It’s Go mark-up language is a little odd, but I’m used to it now.

The old site used markdown but I added some odd new rules and porting all the posts over was kind of a pain. Wrote a php script that pulled down all the posts and wrote them out as json. I then wrote a Python script to find all my odd markdown hacks and convert them to the standard markdown that Hugo uses.

All in all, it only took a few hours and now it render 90% right. There are still a few goofy tags I need to fix by hand.

The images were hosted on a CDN and I moved them locally. I’ve become concerned with the complexity of software. I’m getting to the point where I want everything under my control and simple.

The Thimbleweed Park dev blog was a complicated mess of databases and servers. Something went wrong and the whole thing collapsed. I ending up rendering the whole site out as static html and just hosting that since it wasn’t changing.

I would have been better off with a static site from the beginning, hence this move to Hugo.

One of the reasons I haven’t posted much was the complexity to writing an article

I’m hoping this will be easier.

The one big issue is comments.

I shut down comments after the Return to Monkey Island shit storm and I’ve been reluctant to turn them back on. Can’t we all just get along.

Comments on a static site are an tricky issue. There are some third party solutions like Disqus but I worry about Big Comment sucking up personal information of anyone who comments on my site.

I did watch a YouTube video about how to add comments to a Hugo site and it just requires a little javascript and I can hook it into my existing comment system.

The good news if that system goes down all I lose are the comments, not the whole site. I might give that a try at some point.

Things I still need to do:

1. Make the site responsive to changes in window size (i.e. mobile)
2. Fix up the missing markdown.
3. Get rss working again so the old url still works.
4. Clean up my crappy css.
5. Get social media cards working again.
6. Write some new posts that makes this all worth it.

I’d also like the site to be built with CI when I push it.

P.S. I decided not to do this. A simple and quick rsync command gets it to my server and it’s one less thing I need to worry about. Remember, this was about keeping it simple.

If you notice anything odd or broken, let me know on Mastodon

P.S. I work on my website on the weekends, weekdays are for working on my game. See you next Sat.

As the world spins into chaos, the one constant that brings stability into your world is knowing that grumpygamer.com will always remains April Fools’ joke free.