After announcing a date for the launch of the closed beta of Mr Football – October 1, 12 weeks into the 10-week crunch period and the last day of the looming fortnight of school holidays – the pressure is now well and truly on, even if self-imposed. As an old journalist from way back, I know deadlines can focus the mind. They can also tend to make a whooshing sound as they fly by, as Douglas Adams used to say. We shall see.
I made the decision to post a Reddit thread on r/AFL, something which I was apprehensive about since Reddit has been scything in its criticism of AFL 23 this year. The opening comment referenced that kerfuffle, but all the other comments were pleasingly supportive and positive. Thankfully, that first dude misread the room!
The week was spent mostly on the Scrapbook and Collections scenes, and I probably should have stopped work on them by Wednesday or Thursday to shift towards more immediately productive pursuits. The temptation for turd polishing to get things looking just right was too great, I confess.
Much of the time consumption early in the week was spent on figuring out the intricacies of the rexUI plugin, specifically performance at high memory usage levels. My first instinct has been to throw hundreds of renderTextures (now called Dynamic Textures) representing each card into a single carousel to allow the user to scroll through every possible item at once. The size of the source frames involved, plus the overhead of combining them into new textures, has tested the limits of Phaser and rex’s techniques.
The Scrapbook now works as I envisaged, though it is slow as a wet week. I eventually conceded defeat on the single-carousel version of the Collections scene and separated it into different categories, as the scene was taking a seemingly interminable 10-15 seconds to initialise, even though it operated nicely once it loaded. It was a case of the old dilemma: speed, smoothness, complexity… pick two!
I have also spent a bit of time on Codepen with code to create staggered display lists, to mimic the real-life wooden shields used in footy leagues. That was classic Phaser work: finicky algebra using variables in fiendishly complex equations to get items to display at exact pixel positions. Programmers who prefer GUIs would shudder at the thought, but so much Phaser work is made up of that stuff, and since it’s much like CSS in Web dev I am more than comfortable with it even if it does take a lot of time.
There was also a day or so spent on figuring out which technique to use for masks in the Collections scene, as the native Phaser version just wasn’t cutting it (to coin a phrase). Again it was rex to the rescue, as his plugin showed better performance. Apparently there are other options that might be even better, but investigating them really would be a case of time wasting at this late point.
There was always going to come a point during crunch where I stopped creating new functionality and concentrated on fixing existing code, and that time has just about come. I decided this week that Journeys and the match modes outside Campaign will all have to wait until after the closed beta launch, though they will be first priorities. All I have left on the list to create from scratch is the Firebase elements of the Members system for rewarding daily tasks, and the Wheel for daily random prizes. These are trivial to code, but will take most of the week to be down.
Then the school holidays arrive, and I am not sure how much time I will be able to devote to the project. Maybe it is the wrong decision to place the last two weeks of crunch in a time when my weekdays are not free, I don’t know.
If October arrives and I am not happy with the state of the app, then I can always choose to delay. I am in this for the long haul, so missing a deadline by a week or so is not going to hurt. The other part about a closed beta is that I can dribble out invites according to how many users I think are needed, so it needn’t be any more than a handful to start with while the game is still mostly alpha-coloured. Open beta is the real tester, as that is when the general public get to have their say, as is their right.
If you were wondering, yes, I am writing this stuff mostly to reassure myself rather than you as the reader. 🙂