Welcome to El's-things, it's taken a little longer than planned to get this place up and running but we are here now.
I've been busy, I've got a new website up and running and I've been working on MultiMall
Well, I left my old job in the hospitality sector, had a holiday to Spain, got a job and moved to a new city. It's only taken 3 months.
You might notice some visual changes. I've rebuilt the site with a couple of years extra knowledge.
It loads fast, it's responsive and it's got some fancy database and docker things going on.
Built using:
Hopefully with a more modern system I can deploy apps and services faster and more effectively than before, so watch this space....
MultiMall is still being developed, just not at the pace I would like it be to be. My last update on MultiMall eluded to a playable demo in April.
Yeah... * checks watch *, might have missed that one...
But moving all over the south west, personal things and a well earned holiday might do that to ya.
I believe the final "system" for the MVP / Demo is the job assignment system
But, didn't you have that built?
Well, yes, I did. However, the game has come a long way since then. Before hand the 2 shop entities that I had in the game were static, to mean part of the game and could only ever be those 2 things. The same system now allows for shop entities to be various things all at once. So it's not as simple as clicking the 'Produce Pile' and clicking 'Restock'.
The game now needs to; work out what entity was clicked -> does it provide any interactions -> what interactions are appropriate for the game state in this moment -> display a GUI element with the actions on it handle the selection or null-selection of
it's a lot of steps, but it makes creating new content for the game so much easier once all of this leg work is done.
So what's really left then?
With all that said I am aiming for a late Demo date, just gotta crack on with the behind the scenes work and soon it'll all working.
At some point in the last couple of week I crossed the 3 year mark on this project and it feels like it's become this Ouroboros (self eating snake) of a project, maybe this is what technical debt is to larger software teams. I see it as a part of developing a systems driven game with a data based architecture. I've had to spend time creating hard coded elements to see if a system is going to work and then re-write the same system to use LUA scripting every 6 to 9 month or so.
Once all of this is done though, additional content can be added to the game in under 5 minutes for simple things like stock assets and larger more complex objects like shop entities in just over an hour. Compared to their days / weeks long iterations at the moment.
I'll have to dig it out but you can kinda see it on my Masotodon posts, the game looks the same as it did 18 months ago, mainly because it's all placeholder art, but behind the scenes its a whole different beast. The MVP finish line is in sight, I can't wait to share it with you all.
Until next time.