The second update for Dark Nova just went live yesterday, and while it doesn't have any gameplay content like last patch, it is the reuslt of a ton of work, and one of the last key pieces we wanted to finish before we start promoting our game. This patch updated our HUD, and introduced leaderboards!
Our first major update had a bunch of under the hood changes to help improve performance, and increase browser support. Additionally, we dropped some new content, and we're going to overview them here.
There are a handful of tutorials concerning both Phaser and Typescript, but they are somewhat old at this point, usually rely on a full Visual Studio install, and don’t go into actually hosting your game. While developing Dark Nova I found a plethora of easy to use, cross-platform tools facilitating good development practices and fast iteration for our team. I’m hoping this series can be a working introduction to devops with indie game dev.
If you are interested in setting something like this up, here are some initial steps to crawling a website using a headless browser, running in node. Note that I am using Windows, but everything should more or less be the same if you are on a mac or linux.
Quickly after writing a few low level phantomjs lines, I came across a library that wrapped phantomjs with a higher level, cleaner API.
I met with local community group to discuss an issue they were having in traversing a county-run website. It’s a story most anyone who has interacted with a deeds or records related government site: it’s time consuming, it’s a terrible user experience, and it’s difficult to answer anything but the simplest questions with the information it provides. What started as a simple scraping program turned into something a lot more interesting, so I decided to keep track of the obstacles and technologies I’m using to solve this issue.