On Monday I started the marketing effort for Aigilas. That has lead to some great feedback and a number of changes. Up until this week the dev cycle was working seven days a week during all of my spare time. After last week’s post, I tried an experiment.

The weekend was off-limits for any work. Instead, I enjoyed some time off relaxing with my wife. Once Monday rolled around, I threw together a board on Trello to track TODOs for Aigilas that aren’t as well-defined as GitHub issues. Whenever a thought occurs, I throw it onto the backlog list on Trello. Every morning, I pull three items from the backlog and move them onto the TODO Today list. Then there’s another list to move them through after completing that day. Lastly, a final list contains everything that has ever been finished.

A positive visual feedback loop comes out of this workflow. Progress being made is easy to see, and three tasks a day is extremely manageable. This has only been the first week of trying this new method out, but the results speak for themselves. Not only did Aigilas have its first sales, but many more commits were pushed to GitHub than is typical during the week.

What was accomplished this week? For one, I simplified the way Aigilas is built. It now uses nothing to build and package outside of standard Maven config. Anyone who wants to help with the project has nothing to learn about outside of standard maven practices. Thanks to this change, the entire game can now be edited in a single instance of Intellij IDEA instead of three.

sps-gamelib is still in its own repo, but I am now statically compiling it into Aigilas instead of using the standalone library. The code isn’t stable enough to warrant repackaging and updating my local maven repo each time a minor fix is made.

The launcher for the game will now cache a license that has been entered. Previously, the license needed to be entered every launch in order to pull down updates.

Unifying the game’s aesthetic has continued. All acolytes, the player animation, altars, and the darkness overlay have been updated. The long-term plan is to get some upscaled 16x16 sprites out the door and revise them later if this style doesn’t fit.

There were some distracting graphical glitches that have been fixed. The largest offender were particles and text effects that would repeat over and over. These types of effects are now divided into a separate category of updates that don’t require a synced instance of Random.

These changes and more can be found in the latest stable weekly release. The release schedule plan is to cut a new stable on Fridays and push out an unstable after every git push. I am setting up a build server at the moment to handle the constant unstable pushes.

Want to chat? Throw a comment on this Reddit post or shoot me a tweet @XBigTK13X.