PraxisMapper

Played Pokemon Champions for about 45 minutes, small twist on the main issue with all pokemon games.

I told you my birth year. You know I'm multiple decades old. Please stop acting like this is the first pokemon game I've played. Assume I know how to play one.

It is 2026 and FTP is still somehow the best option for copying tons of files and still a giant pain to set up.

@jds@mastodon.gamedev.place I've felt like people want a discord server because it means they expect questions they ask to be answered, instead of having to read documentation or a forum where the same question has been asked and answered many times before.

Got my hopes up for a minute. Discovered Traveller AR, a mobile game from 2011-12 built around the TTRPG setting. Thought it might have been a location-based game that (slightly) predates Ingress.

Nope. It only uses AR as a gimmick, and not even one with gameplay. The beta launch trailer doesn't even demonstrate the gimmick in the name of the game. The gameplay trailer features no actual gameplay, just still screenshots.

I can see why this one died from lack of funding.

One neat trick to juice your interactions:

Make sure your game is partially non-functional. People will re-install in multiple times thinking the issue is on their side instead of reporting that something doesn't look right.

This is sarcasm, of course. But fixing my game so maps actually downloaded again dropped downloads/browser play count.

I need to remember to manually update my server certs more often. Kinda surprised that nobody reports my game not working for....2 months despite the daily hit or two it gets.

Finally getting around to proving out admin bounds logic in my demo project. I've had this data and setup in-place for over a year, but an error in merging data sets made it unusable in an unknown number of areas.

This year everything was done in one shot, no merging required. Plus adding in some features for flexibility that the core server's had for a while.

Techbros are gonna make me rename my app, aren't they?

Map processing for the year is done, in the fastest it's ever been. It took 4 days total this time to get the global offline data ready. This used to be between 2 weeks and a month, depending on how many times stuff stopped.

I will have to update my games to use the slightly different format, but the big slow part is not nearly as slow as it used to be.

RE: https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@Praxismapper/113913081681170905

My end count on unique games played for the year was 304. That skips a bunch of graphics-only romhacks and treats every Space Station 14 server as one game. Does include demos and prototypes on itch I checked out.