Hello friends!
We are entering the busiest part of the year! Our friends in the US have just finished giving their thanks and eating their turkey, and now the world tumbles headfirst towards the hectic end-of-year season 😄
I have no idea how I’m supposed to survive that, because things have already picked up some crazy speed on this pirate ship. But, as we say in Spanish: It’s not a disease if you enjoy the itch (unofficial translation, do not quote me).
Team meeting
✈️ The highlight of the month was our 5-day team meeting in Seattle. Most of us met face to face for the first time after years of working together remotely, and it was GREAT. I already knew everyone was good at their jobs, but meeting in person showed me they’re also just genuinely interesting, kind, funny people. We spent a lot of time chatting and sharing stories, and I came home with exactly zero doubts that this team can handle whatever we throw at it.
And of course, a lot of that is thanks to our captains, especially Hatchet (Jaguar chose to keep the mysterious vibe going…). They organized a packed schedule that somehow managed to leave us exhausted and wanting more. But more importantly, they built this team, explained the vision, and then trusted us enough to give us real freedom in our areas. It’s dizzying in the best way: exciting, a bit scary. But honestly? I’m taking this ball and seeing how far I can run with it.
Thanks to EVERY SINGLE ONE OF YOU, pirates.
Review
:task-docs-dev: Our new writer, Zero, has been doing a fantastic job with the developer tutorials. We now have a workflow running at a good pace: I send him a list of tutorials we need, with descriptions and links to code when available, and a few days later he comes back with a GitHub pull request. From there we polish it together, and rarely need to iterate more than once or twice.
The system seems to be working really well so far. Proof of that is that this month you already have two new tutorials on Complete and Bonded Aggregate transactions, which are longer and more complex than what we started with last month.
Site Configuration
🐛 As expected, the new tutorials pushed the docs site hard enough to uncover a pesky little bug. This one broke several links to reference pages whenever too many appeared on the same line. Good catch… and mercilessly squashed. Other than that, the new docs site is holding up pretty handsomely.
Management
:task-docs-dev: This part cannot be avoided: I need to spend some time preparing Zero’s tutorials list so he never ends up waiting on me. It does not take long, though.
Writing content
🪶 Not much writing on my side this month. In fact, these blog posts are pretty much the only Symbol-related writing I’m doing lately 😅
I did update the current docs with a new version of the REST API, but that did not require writing, just rebuilding the site. And rebuilding is becoming trickier as dependencies evolve and occasionally break things. Hopefully soon we will have enough content to take the new docs out of testing and finally archive the old ones.
Daruma
:daruma-studios-logo-white: You knew this section was coming 🙂 Whenever I am not working on any of the above, I am adding things to XYM City’s Game Design Document.
I’ve made games professionally in the past, back when making them was easier simply because it required fewer people. And I’ve released games (OK, one game) recently as a solo dev. But let me tell you something: preparing the production of a game for a bigger team, taking all the ideas dancing in your head and putting them in writing… That stuff is hard. You do not realize how hard until you actually sit down to do it.
AND YET, I am as excited as when my high-school friend and I got our first teapot spinning on our 8086 PCs. I haven’t felt this energy in a long, long time, and for that I am grateful.
Bear with me friends, this game is happening, and many more after it 🥲
Here you have each task’s relative time distribution for this month:
This is the current status of all documentation tasks. The main line to watch is Symbol Documentation at the top, with all other entries listed as its subtasks. The bars in the chart represent how many of those subtasks have been completed. The change since last month is shown in orange.
<aside> ⚠️
It may look like there has been no progress since last month because even though we added two completed Transaction tutorials, we also expanded the list with new pages (Accounts, Transactions, and the Textbook).
But do not worry, this is a good thing. It means the finished docs will have more content!
</aside>
I always like to end these posts with a section about the XYM City project, because you can check the progress of the docs yourself in the test docs site, but that is not always the case for the game. Especially now that I’m working on design documents instead of the more exciting stuff like mapping out the city.
Still, here’s a screenshot. This should give you an idea of the vibe I want for the city, once proper mapping and texturing begin (hopefully handled by actual mappers and artists) 😅
