My carefree days of hours-long coding sessions are on hiatus, it seems.

Well, at least are coming in more sproadic than in the throes of mid-winter.

I still am managing to find good blocks of free time to work through tickets, adding small enhancements, squashing bugs, and tweaking algorithms. The game creeps towards some kind of state of playability.

And that’s the first key here, I think. 

I spent two months working and committing code almost every single day, and all of that culminated in a thing that looked and played like an alpha-state game. Which is a big deal.

Getting that same game to beta? That’s going to be the work of a few more months of work, lots of art, lots of writing, lots of hunting bugs. I mean, I now have an entire category of tickets that is called “playtesting” by which I sort things that I’m pretty sure I have fixed but until they crop up naturally in the middle of play—or I play long enough to feel confident that I fixed them—there isn’t much to do (besides maybe writing some tests) to ensure that they are working.

And that’s the second key here, I think.

This game thing I made is big and complex and—hell—its a simulation and it rolls along simulating and doing stuff behind the scenes that are the result of compound effects of algorithms that I wrote. Calculate this, math that, compute these. And it is deeply fascinating to see that at work—but it is anything but simple to untangle in my own head to know if it is actually working.

I did the most dad-gamer thing the other day.  I ordered a copy of Civilization VII (which recently released) for my PS5, but I ordered it using airline points. Yeah, I had enough spare points to buy a ninety-dollar new release game and yet I still have bank.  But I have been watching the reviews of the new game (and I have played all six previous versions when they were new plus the spin offs) and people are pickyAF about the mechanics.  This game that is so complex it is almost an organic lifeform in an of itself, doesn’t behave exactly how people expect and they rant and scream online about how terrible it is. 

And that’s the third key here, I think.

Players can be particular. They want complex things but they also seem to hate complexity. Pleck’s Mart is no Civ 7 on the complexity scale, but I wrote about complexity previously when I compared this creation to Dwarf Fortress and the complexity of Pleck’s Mart has definiely increased since that post.  Yet, with complexity comes unpredictability, and simultaneously the inability to game out ever combination of that complexity. 

How do you trust it other than to play it and have many other people play it and then be ready to nudge it back into balance if the balance is not as tuned as one might think?