With inquisitive minds we marched upon the Silicon Hills.
Austin Game Conference
The highlight of this month was definitely the Austin Games Conference. Roy, Bud, and I all attended, driving 11 hours from KC. With keynotes from Niantic and Amazon Games, along with many other interesting presentations, it was quite enjoyable.
I was able to attend a few talks on microservice game development. Unfortunately Azure was entirely absent from the conference. Which is a real shame considering Service Fabric has some real potential.
We also made a few good contacts and may be announcing some new team members soon!
Server Infrastructure
Last monthly we discussed our server refactor that included abstracting our services. One service remained to be tackled this month--and boy was it a doozy. It was our character service, which had lots of data access calls, increasing the complexity. It’s done though!
I eagerly published these changes to Azure so that I could begin work on client reconnecting. Unfortunately our cloud cluster is unhappy with these changes. We were running a test 3 node cluster, but that doesn’t appear to be sufficient for stateful service fault domains. We’ve since upgraded to a 5 node cluster… to no avail. Now we get timeouts registering the application. So I may have to get in touch with Azure support soon. Until this gets resolved our cloud servers are down.
Ability Development
Roy has been truckin’ along on ability development. He coded the server and client side for the following fire abilities this month:
- Molten Barrage -- A quick and cheap burst of flaming projectiles fired at random enemies, applying a long lasting but minor DOT.
- Flamethrower -- Channels flames on the enemy, draining mana until exhausted or canceled.
- Extinguish -- Removes all of the caster’s pyromancy DOTs and returns mana for each.
- Combust -- Explodes all the caster’s pyromancy DOTs dealing 150% of their remaining damage instantly.
In addition he’s made an interesting change to Taunt. If an attacker is on their way to a target and gets taunted, the attacker’s active ability will be redirected to the taunter. This adds more usability to Taunt.
'til next time Daemons,
Trey
Change Log:
- Character service abstractions & refactor
- Added target changing for taunt
-
Server and client coded for fire abilities
- Combust
- Flamethrower
- Extinguish
- Molten Barrage
Bug Fixes
- Improving toggleable ability frameworks to prevent instant untoggling
- Combust to now auto target the enemy team