The last month has been a lot to digest, so what does that mean, and what’s happening on the project?

Admin. So Much Admin.

Between dealing with the break up of game and IP administrative tasks and all the associated paperwork, as well as taxes, the amount of administrative work has been pretty oppressive. It’s hard to get much of anything done when you only have a handful of hours a week and it’s being gobbled up by paperwork.

Luckily almost all of this is one time (or annual) work, so it isn’t an indication of a “normal” work week. There’s definitely daylight showing as well. The paperwork associated with the company changes is mostly done and I’m getting actual development work done now.

Actual Development Work, Sort of

Again, with the IP changes there has been a lot of work to split out Tides from the rest of the system. I definitely ran into some challenges here to try to keep the process simplified, access reasonable and costs down. Reworking the system to support newfangled stuff was taking place with supporting the original stories in mind, and now there’s not much point in doing that. Except, we still want to properly support the original content until new stuff is online.

So how do you do work without being locked into legacy support for stories that will definitely be going away? It’s also a less fun reality that the legacy stories probably won’t be played very much, so how much energy is it appropriate to invest to keep things up and running that will hardly be touched? How much do you hamstring new development to do so?

These are all pretty tricky questions, and have a lot of solutions which is sometimes the worst kind of problem to have.

I’ve finally landed on something I think is going to work fairly well to free up future development and keep the legacy products working as well with a minimum of support. Will dig into that in a development journal.

Story Development

There has been some interest from creators to build out stories and adapt their current work to the platform, but I haven’t been ready to supply much information to them so far. I’ve been building out some very basic documentation and thinking about how to put some community features into place that won’t further dilute the already low level of engagement we have. Still, discord is only a medium good way to support creators like this, I think. The lack of persistence makes it poor for people starting, so I think a good ol’ forum is probably a good idea. Also, the documentation can’t be regular web pages. It’s too slow and cumbersome, so I’m experimenting with using Obsidian exports to keep things very flexible, at least a the beginning. There might be specific documenting systems that make sense to use as well. Research goes on, but won’t for long. Will be putting something up soon.

Have done some very vague sketches for an in-house story, but it’s a long way off, and I think most of my time right now has to be on tools. So it’s hardly worth mentioning.

Infrastructure

The march of time continues, and with it comes updates. Laravel 11 has been out for a while, and with it comes new stuff and new requirements. I try to stay on top of these kind of platform upgrades, but I’d have waited a little longer normally. In this case though there’s some good reasons to upgrade immediately. The site runs on PHP 8.1 right now (or at least it did this morning, it might not tonight) and Laravel 11 wants PHP 8.2. That means rebuilding the environment in production, something that was already happening to support the legacy Tides server. So, why not make it more complicated?

Honestly though, if there’s disruption and a time sink like rebuilding environments I’d rather get everything done at once. Also, Laravel Reverb is a new thing that looks like a “free” replacement for Pusher that doesn’t have the scary scaling costs associated with it. It has different scary scaling costs associated with it, but at least they don’t involve vendor costs. That’s great! Except that I now have code which was written, tested, never released and will be reworked to support a new backend, all without ever seeing the light of day. This kind of tail chasing can really eat up time if you let it, but I think in this case there’s not a lot of choice. Laravel 11 is groundwork for Reverb, which requires 8.2, which needs a rebuild, which we were doing already. So away we go.

Final Thoughts

It has been hard to communicate while the internal changes have been working their way through, and it’s not as if there’s much to say about it now, even with it being mostly done. It’s a kind of transparency black hole that I hate dealing with, but I think now that it’s in the rear view mirror it’ll be easier.

I can’t wait to write more dev journals and be back to normal-ish. Feels good be pretty much there.