I have been very lax in writing these blog posts across the past three weeks, missing posts on those crucial weeks 11 and 12. I can blame school holidays, I can blame the fact that crunch time was coming to its peak, and I can blame my inexperience with managing it for the first time as a solo dev. Fact of the matter is that I have barely even thought about blogging for long periods, so deep into the development process was I.
While I am medicated for both depression and ADHD, crunch started affecting my mood and sleep patterns. My wake up times in the last week of crunch tightened in from 6am to 5am, then 4am, then finally on the penultimate morning at 2:15am… at which point I just swore at the clock and tried to go back to sleep (which I blessedly did, half an hour later).
On the outside, I didn’t look like I was getting into dark areas, and in my day to day work I still maintained an excellent work ethic without shirking my family and work duties. It became apparent, nonetheless, that my subconscious was treating crunch as a Big Thing. I have had enough therapy to keep a healthy respect for the disconnect between my conscious mind and the unknowable workings of the lizard brain parts that underpins the fiction of my individuality. Despite keeping a relatively even keel externally, there was a maelstrom going on underneath. Basically, if I wasn’t on drugs to keep the spikes and troughs smoothed out, I probably would have been noticeably stressed, to the point of panic attacks and maybe worse.
As it was, however, I reached the beta deadline with what I hoped was a workable application.
There was perhaps a little less gold than I had hoped for on my week 12 Roadmap (above), but when you compare it to what I had started with 12 weeks earlier (below), it has been a major achievement in my professional career. I sometimes wonder what I was doing in the four years before getting on medical amphetamines to treat my ADHD, because my pace of development seems to have accelerated greatly since getting on them earlier this year.
I know that I spent a lot of time just learning Phaser and Firebase, and a seemingly inordinate amount of time assembling photofitted player images which ended up being superseded by Midjourney. All I can do is shrug and move on, no point wondering what might have been if I had been treated earlier.
On Sunday when it was time to declare an end to my first crunch, my old mate Lekdog, who has made his name in my industry of fantasy football, was kind enough to host me on his Twitch channel for what turned out to be a marathon playtesting session that lasted nearly two hours.
Doing that livestream was cathartic, it is fair to say. I was able to spill my guts on just about every aspect of the project from go to whoa. It was a huge emotional milestone, which as a solo dev is so important. I told Lekdog that the history of tech launch events was such that bugs and crashes were almost inevitable – it happens to the best like Gates and Brin, not to mention Kojima and Carmack! I was fully prepared for it, to the extent that I had a whiteboard ready to go with running totals of screw ups. I am glad to report that the solitary crash happened at the very end of the tutorial, and a total of ten live bugs was pretty good all things considered.
Then it was time to actually open the beta with the first emails to invite coaches to the beta. I got a feeling in the last two weeks that I was not going to be ready for huge numbers to start with, and at this point a week in, there are still only 12 invitees playing Mr Football. Only half of those have bothered to submit any feedback, which I suppose is not unusual.
My workday is not appreciably different now that the beta launch day has come and gone, I suppose. I am still splitting my time on bug fixing old code and writing new stuff. I am sleeping better, so my subconscious seems to have been satisfied for now… to the extent that my kids had to wake me up on Tuesday to get them ready for school, because I forgot to re-set my alarm!
I have spent way too much time on PWA models, truth be told. I seemed to be going in circles with it at one point, from a flat JavaScript file importing a CDN to embedding it from Webpack, and then even trying with little reward to embed a service worker in Phaser itself. That last one didn’t fly at all! And then back to flat files.
On the subject of PWAs, after figuring out Workbox I found out a few weeks ago about PWABuilder.com, and read for the first time about how Microsoft has taken up the PWA cudgel after Google dropped it. I had already suspected something like that, given than the previously-ubiquitous Jeff Posnick had left his role at Google as their PWA point man a few years ago. There doesn’t seem to be a singular article anywhere laying out the recent history of PWAs from an industry standpoint. This surprises me in some ways but is also not shocking, because I know first hand how technology journalism has had the guts ripped out of it in recent decades (my first career was as a tech journo).
I am still bullish about running Mr Football solely as a PWA, at least to start with. I work better with a minimum of third party involvements. Discovery and marketing are both going to be issues, no doubt. I suspect it will be a slow burn at best next season, if it does indeed catch fire.
Now, back to the trusty spreadsheets. The big change in this week 1 Beta version of the Roadmap is the first upgrades in the Beta column. That feels good. It doesn’t look like there are a lot of items in that column, but just about every entry there involves another complex back-end system that will have to be built and perfected. As with the crunch period, the front-end stuff for those scenes in Phaser is mainly done, it’s a matter of writing Firebase code to run and work in conjunction with the client.
I had a feeling a day or two ago of pure hope that this is going to be a really, really good game. I find myself drifting away from Twitter and towards Reddit for my social media fix, and reading r/gamedev has been fascinating for me. There is a strong dislike of mobile games in general and gacha games in particular on that sub, as they are both seen as exploitative and manipulative. That is a fair call, of course, as the big companies in the industry have refined their Skinner boxes into moneymaking machines. Perhaps I am naive to expect to step into this world and carve out anything of lasting value. Maybe I am not going to be as lucky and timely as I was with FanFooty, as I could be barking up entirely the wrong tree. One thing on my side is that I have the patience to fully deliver on the concept, to the extent of treating the entire 2024 season as a test run. We shall see.
There are another 11 weeks to go until Christmas, which is my next major goal for a full release with in-app purchases. Then things get serious, because I have to provide something worth buying.
