Month: January 2017

One Step Build

I just now made build 365, which seemed as good a number as any to mention.

One way I’ve improved the development process is to have an easy way to post a copy of the game for the rest of the team to test. With King of Dragon Pass, this was basically a manual step. Now, there’s a script that increments the build number and does a clean build, then copies it to a web site. It also uses rsync to copy any script files to a Dropbox folder, so QA has easy access to the corresponding source.

This isn’t build automation (it’s not automatic, like Travis or buddybuild), but it’s painless. The basic build takes about 40 seconds (uploading is more variable). And it does mean we pass one of the steps in the Joel Test. Our builds aren’t daily (since we’ve been at this more than a year), but they are at least frequent.

Proofreading

Like King of Dragon Pass before it, Six Ages will have a lot of text. Which means a lot of opportunity for typos or other misspellings.

Most of the text is in OSL scripts, such as these excerpts:

saga: <expeditionLeader> was attacked, but returned home with <his/her> escort.
sagaText: The worshipers suffered the same fate.
text: We eventually pieced this together from stories told by wandering traders.

The scene compiler outputs all strings into a single text file. It looks something like this:

<expeditionLeader> was attacked, but returned home with <his/her> escort.
<expeditionLeader> was attacked and wounded, but returned home with <his/her> escort.
Unfortunately, <he/she> lost the livestock they were driving home.
<expeditionLeader> and <his/her> escort <disappeared mysteriously/were ambushed by trolls and completely devoured>.
The worshipers suffered the same fate.
We eventually pieced this together from stories told by wandering traders.

And that file can be spellchecked. I just use TextEdit. The biggest issue with proofreading is that the game uses a lot of proper names and jargon specific to Glorantha. Luckily it’s easy enough to add “Orlanth” to the dictionary (or the ignore list). More problematic is that variable names (like expeditionLeader) also show up here, though ignoring them usually works too.

Another issue is that it’s a big file. It may be generated by our tool but it still takes a human a while to review, so that doesn’t happen often (in fact the first complete review was today).

This is just a brute force pass. Many typos end up with words that are spelled correctly. And once in a while game-specific names get misspelled. So QA still needs to keep an eye open for problems.

Embarrassment of Riches

I’ve written before about art thumbnails, the initial sketch for a scene that we use to make sure the layout and storytelling work.

three alternate thumbnail sketchesThis set seems particularly hard to choose between. They work in a purely functional sense (i.e. they can be covered with text and still read well). But each has some nice elements. For example, alternative 1 has a closeup, which is nice. But alternative 2 is good for showing the extended family. And I particularly like the children in all three.