Then... it was 2023. The first dev log of the new year on the 1st of the month, whatever next! Tales of Yore is about a year and half old now and it's been quite a journey so far. This month I've been doing a lot of getting distracted by shiny toy projects (which I'll show you below) but progress on Tales has continued on - I have the majority of the over world for the new update mapped out and so many ideas/details ready. So, what did I do this month? Well first, if you haven't already....

Play Tales of Yore

(and support on Patreon if you like)

A New Playground

Now I'm not a big fan of distributing the game on any platform where there isn't a decent reason (different devices, potential for support etc), however I came across Newgrounds in my travels around the interwebs and the nostalgia got the better of me!

For those who don't know, Newgrounds used to be the ultimate place to find Flash games, I mean this was a long long time ago and I was pleasantly surprised to find it live and well with the same strange community thats always been there. It didn't take much to get the game up and running there but unfortunately they don't seem to have any sort of automated deployment/update/publish mechanism so I have to manually update the client at the moment.

Please Newgrounds, please, do something on this score! Even so, you can now play Tales of Yore on Newgrounds if thats your thing.

That Nagging Feeling

While I never intended to make money from Tales, it has started to cost a bit to keep it up and running between server hosting, graphics and general overheads. I won't ever make the game pay to win, or even require people to pay to play, however it was suggested a gentle reminder might be worth dropping in the game that it's only supported by the nice players who decide to help out.

The dialog above pops up after you've played for 25 hours, and then every 25 hours of play after that. I think thats ok, not too naggy, but at least a reminder. However, I can tell you that so far it has had zero effect. While there have been plenty of people who have supported the game this month either through Steam, Paypal, Patreon or the new ones (see below) - not one of them was driven from this dialog. 

I'm really not sure how to read that data, but I'll wait another couple of months before trying to draw any conclusions or actions.

More ways to Buy

As part of the nag screen above I got some immediate feedback that unless I could allow people to pay through the relevant app stores (Google Play and Apple App Store) then it wasn't really fair to remind people. As always I try to listen! :)

I was pretty surprised how easy it was, about 3 days (read 7-8 hours) of development later and both iOS and Android in-app purchase (or IAP) are now supported in game. What surprised me most of all was the lack of paper work I had to file with either company to be able to start taking payments through their platforms.

More interestingly still - the review process was awful. I would have expected when you're adding something that people pay for then the review process would be more stringent - after all I take it very seriously when I'm accepting someone's hard earned cash. 

Android - the review took 3 days but they didn't exercise anything, at all, they didn't even try the purchases in a sandbox. Just nothing. As far as I could see they may have brought up the screen to buy once, but never actually done anything with it. Terrible huh? 

Well, Apple: hold my beer..

Apple - the review took 2 days but they didn't exercise anything - including running the game at all. If they had they would have discovered the build I uploaded was broken. The game didn't even start. They approved it and released it for me in that form. The first I knew of the issue was when I got an email saying the app had been approved and updated my phone via the store. Bam, nothing works! Great job Apple, thanks for taking my $100 a year for that careful curating!

The First Raid

Well its been a while coming but I introduced the first raid in the game, it existed for the Christmas period and featured this little guy:

The Grouch was stealing Christmas and only the citizens of Yore could save the day! It took a lot of tuning, I originally added him in thinking he'd be absolutely devastating - promptly top level players walked up and kicked his butt in minutes. Again and again I scaled him up until he really felt like a challenge to even the most hardly players.

Then... I gave him magic attacks and melee attacks and had him change between them

Then... I gave him the ability to heal himself between fights

Then... I let him summon some giant nutcrackers to help him out

And finally, it felt like a raid, players were banding together and strategising how to take him out, accepting that most likely they'd die trying and the laughter and fun being had was incredible - what a developer buzz! It was great to see people playing the game in a different way and fantastic to see how many people helped each other out. 

Suffice it to say Christmas was saved!

Man I hate Notches

As part of pushing harder on iOS and Android, I got some stark but very fair feedback. The game while it worked on mobile very well (even if I do say so myself) had some pretty rubbish implementation when dealing with the quirks of iOS. That damn notch on the later bigger iPhones!

So, now Tales deals with notches (or rather "Safe Areas") gracefully. It also deals with background web audio on iOS and copes much better when the network drops either because of mobile service or because you backgrounded the app. In general in now feels much much more like a normal native iOS game. 

Sometimes (most of the time) when you get this sort of feedback and fix the issues you don't hear from the person again, in this case it gave me one of my favourite reviews of all time:

Distractions, Distractions, Distractions

Finally this month I have been getting distracted a lot. I've been telling myself its healthy to try out some other game ideas and coding tasks - don't get stale on just Tales, but I'm not sure thats quite it. I just like to play around with stuff sometimes. Anyway, for better or worse here's a few small things I built this month.

That Block Game

This was an idea that was burning in my head so I had to get it out. In the end I made the game available on the web here and also as a mobile app on iOS and Android. It's a pretty simple puzzle push game that I put together from start to finish in less than 48 hours (including working my day job!). It took Google and Apple an extra day to review it and then we're off...

Dwarven King

I got a bit obsessed with building a non-3d rendered dungeon crawler in the vein of Dungeon Master and Eye of The Beholder. I'd seen some work that Deepnight Games had done so started by replicating that. The goal was not to use 3D projection or a 3D engine but actually blit pieces of sprites to the screen in the right shades and sizes to get the correct effect - just like in the old days. It worked out pretty well.

You can try it on the web here (should be mobile compatible).

Peer to Peer Game Network using WebRTC 

Having had a few discussions online about network gaming I thought it'd be worth while to put some sort of sample together to show how web games (that I make for instance) can make use of UDP in the browser without having to have native extensions etc. For background I've been using WebRTC for a long time, I was involved with the very early draft specifications (when ROAP was still a thing) - so it's not a big leap for me to put this together. However, I haven't contributed anything to the open source community since I've been back in the games development mode so I thought it was time.

It's a very simple demo, you can move the little character around and see everyone else moving. Exciting huh? Well it services as a decent example of how to make a simple network game. The nice thing here is it can be used for session/group/brawl games where you need a way to connect a bunch of players into a game level - it can all been done within the browser and needs only a very lightweight match making server to get the players connected. All the actual game data is passed directly between browsers making it very very scalable and lightweight!

I put out the code for the "game" and the match making relay server - all in Typescripts (server in NodeJS) over on github for anyone that wants it!

Fin.

For whatever reason you're here, thanks for reading, hope you found something useful and drop me a comment to let me know what you think.