The Plumbing Works

Last week I mentioned struggling with easyXDM. The project author (who must have a Google Alert set up) dropped by to mention that I should ignore the docs on the website in favor of the README. I spent this week’s budget of two hours sorting out what went wrong there.

There’s not a lot more to say about this week’s activity. I did most of my time at the end of a bit of illness, so everything was going in slow motion. I feel lucky to have completed anything. EasyXDM now shows the Steppe renderer, asks the main page to AJAX info on the current cities of the map, displays them in a list (as a simple proof of functionality), and (passing data in the opposite direction) requests the main page resize its iframe to fit. Just for completeness’s sake, here’s a screenshot of it listing the cities:

The obvious next step is to clean up the JavaScript and then start adding gameplay here. I mentioned in a design post (you are subscribed to this blog’s feed to get those, right?) that I was considering creating a “travel meter” for new players to get to visit cities more often. It’s occurred to me that it would be a lot easier for me to build that mechanic than a periodic update of player position, so I think my next project will be to count travel time and let the player spend it moving between cities. This will close the loop of fetching game state, displaying it, and taking player input. With that functionality, it’s time to roll up my sleeves and implement gameplay.

I’m happy with how long it’s taken to get to this point. I’ve had some hassles because of choosing very new technology (don’t strain anything patting yourself on the back, Jim), but it’s been minor. It only looks like a lot because of the limited time available each week. I could’ve skipped almost all of it by leaving out Steppe until it matured more, but as it planted the seed for Oaqn I felt right starting there.