Gooood morning, people!
I’m feeling super energized today, because I’ve been working almost non-stop on the game for the whole month, and it feels… G. R. E. A. T.
Let’s get the serious stuff out of the way quickly so I can show you how much the baby has grown already 😄
Writing Content
:nem-shield: Last month the Symbol developer tutorials were overhauled to use statically typed descriptors and to include Java versions of the code. This month it was the turn of the NEM docs.
Luckily, both ChatGPT and I have a lot of experience with this task now, and even though it’s a lot of work, it was completed pretty quickly. Take a look at the results!
Review
:symbol-shield: Did a final review of the Java docs written last month, and their Japanese translation.
Site configuration
⚙️ Fixed CI build breaks due to updated dependencies, ported all the recent improvements from the Symbol docs site to the NEM docs site, and added redirects from some old NEM pages to their new equivalents
Management
This section used to mean Documentation Management, but lately it’s more about Game Management 😁
All the artists in the company are now more or less involved in XYM City 3D, and that means that we need coordination. I’ve prepared preliminary lists of assets and prioritized them in the order we’ll need them for the Vertical Slice demo: concepts for locations and characters, character turnarounds, character 3D models & animations, city maps, textures, sounds, music, dialogues… everything is in a database now!
This was meant to be an easy first game for us, but I might have gotten carried away a bit… and I regret nothing! 😅
Here you have each task’s relative time distribution for this month. As you can see, I’m almost exclusively focused on the video game now.
A quick Bridge update, since several people have been asking about it.
This month the team has been mostly working on finishing an internal monitoring tool that warns about low balances, issues with external services, and overall bridge health. As explained in the Symbol bridge Docs page, this bridge is not a coordinated, trustless exchange between users, but a centralized service operated by The Symbol Syndicate. Therefore, we need to have robust monitoring in place before making it public.
The bridge will go public when the new wallets, which are going to be the bridge’s main frontend, are complete. The code for the Symbol wallet is mostly finished and is now in the cleanup and testing phase. It will also serve as the basis for the NEM wallet, which should make its development much faster.
It’s gamedev time! XYM City in the morning, XYM City in the evening, sleep, repeat. Weekends included.
My wife already hates it, and we have barely started. Bear with me, honey, it’ll be worth it! 💪🏻
I’m the main driver of this project, so I’m wearing many hats. Let me give you a taste:
Writer: This will be a narrative game, so the story drives the rest. I know what I want to talk about, so I write the summary into the Game Design Document. Then I split it into game missions, which are like novel chapters that the player can experience more or less in any order.
Then I write the dialogues for the missions. Besides text, dialogue files can also contain arbitrary commands, such as opening doors or adding new mission objectives. This is very flexible and, so far, works well.
Developer: Godot takes care of 3D rendering and physics, but we still need to write the game-specific code to handle:
User Interface: Map screen (and navigation), Journal screen (to keep track of active missions), Messages screen
Game mechanics: locked doors, discovery, NPC routes, …
I’m doing all this in GDScript, with a little help from Codex.