10/03/2023 Strayed from the Process.

"Discipline starts with waking up early." Jocko Willink. Well I lost my disicipline and piled on too many things in my backlog and into a sprint that never ended, six months overdue. So, it became impossible to make progress and it was kind of discouraging. I had a couple of fire walks and a few more next month that I need to prepare for. I had just too many plates spinning at the same time. Project Valkyrie was the easiest to drop. I miss working on it, but I took on too much. I also didn't follow the Agile/Scrum process.

Think it is easy in development to think, wait that's not enough. Maybe I can just try to finish one more thing...then those things never get finished or five more things pop up and suddenly it's not fun anymore and there's no progress. I abandoned my habits and what's left is a bunch of unfinished work and had zero motivation or time to pick things back up.

I need to get back into the habit of waking up early. Need to finish or drop some other problems and projects. Lastly need to take an honest look at the backlog and take some quick wins to get the process going again. I would like to dedicate a small amount of time to this. I noticed how many times I wrote "need". I don't "need to" and I think that's another problem. This isn't an obligation, there's zero users clamoring for an update. There's zero articles, blogs, or videos about chapter 7 being released. I bet the hits are very low. That's just creating and putting pressure on myself to avoid real problems.

08/05/2023 Been Busy except with Project Valkyrie.

Had a long weekend in Cape Cod, a firewalk to prepare for and a firewalk website to build. Also running an ACA meeting on Thursday nights. Still, I should be dedicating some time to the game. To stay in fighting shape. I miss working on the project and starting next week, I'll be on vacation for another couple of weeks.

I'll dedicate some time to the project, do a retrospective and close the long overdue sprint, and get some 'story time' going just to start the juices flowing again. It's hard to focus on so many things at once. So I made a conscious decision to lay off this for a while. Sadly, looks like laying off it became a habit.

05/07/2023 Need to Finish the Game!

The web traffic is pretty bad. The company itself is pretty bad. Rock bottom is a good word, maybe starting to inch below the surface. Still, I want to finish this game. I didn't spend the last couple of years coding and learning to quit before the game is done. I'm still learning new things about Phaser, the project, and myself. I am also going to promote the game not just finish it and put it on the shelf. It has been a great learning experience and a lot of fun.

Progress with Chapter 7 is moving forward. I dedicated a lot of time to boss that may not fit the overall game, but it is too late to take it out now. I'll try to make it fit.

04/01/2023 Game is Done!

April Fools'! Sorry couldn't resist. It's been hard to make progress. Been hard to play racquetball, recover from a cold, workout consistently, work on my life and family stuff. There are just too many irons in the fire. I make zero progress at work and barely keep the bugs from bringing down the system. So, I'm back to spinning plates and not too fond of that habit. I want fewer plates to worry about.

Think chapter 7 is almost ready. Unfortunately, the original program I used for my character portraits, Fuse, is not supported anymore and I need to add another character. So I found NightCafe, which does too good a job and makes my old pictures look like it was done on a Commodore 64 (not knocking the C64 by any means). Anyway, so I had to reimagine the characters, which feels totally wrong at this point. It is hard after like four years of using the same images. AI prefers to make something other than average-looking people. Sarah isn't meant to be drop-dead gorgeous or anything. But, at the end of the day, I need to move things forward.

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		Jack Wilkinson (Hero/Main Character) I like the idea that he seems like a hardy and stocky fellow. I mean during the course of the game, he's going to face several challenges. I didn't want an overly heroic, but I wanted him to be flawed, unsure of himself, and out of his element. Which of course he is.
		Sarah Henderson (Space Station Commander) Just a little bit of an improvement. I remember playing with the slider for Sarah's smile in the old software. The eyes didn't exactly follow along. I started playing with Das 3D, but I wanted something fast. I tried several different Sarah pictures. I wanted someone attractive, but kind of reserved. Someone that Jack would get smitten by. Also wanted her expression to show a good amount of inteligence. Think I got pretty close.
		William Hardinger (Commander) A.k.a. Commander Hardass. I wanted kind of tough old man look. A kind of take no BS guy. I remember my best friend playing the demo and he said, "He yelled at me." When he failed to get a good time on chapter 1's speed demo. I might change it, so he can be a little nicer. But if I was in his situation, I would be a little on edge too.

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That being written, I don't want to drop this. Not when I'm so close. It may take longer than expected.

02/19/2023 Progress Finally!

I made a mistake and dedicated some time to other projects and it took a while to get back into the Project Valkyire mindset and getting used to Phaser again. It's further complicated that I have pieced this together over four years, so each piece is done with a certain skillset, and sometimes new stuff doesn't play well with old stuff. It's necessary to making progress, but doesn't make for a very stable code base.

Things with the mini-boss from Chapter 7 are finally coming together. So I'm looking forward to making real progress instead of just debugging and being frustrated with stuff not working. I also kind of worked on the last level of the game a long time ago and will need to redo some of the sprites.

I bought some 2D sprite tutorials from Saint11 (Pedro Medeiros) and had a lot of fun making explosions. Also fired up Leshy SFMaker. I had a lot of fun just drawing and adding new stuff to the game.

01/16/2023 Carried Away with chapter 7

My current sprint was supposed to end on 12/10/22 and here we are over a month later. I was having a great time coding the main boss of chapter 7. Still not done, but I got past the tipping point where I had to prove everything worked. It had to go through some evolving, I scrapped one of the earlier designs. It looked too similar to the space station. Still trying to justify its existence. So maybe it would have to evolve again.

Asked a question on discord and got an answer that solved my problem. I should reach out and be part of the Phaser community a little more. We'll see, one thing at time. I often have too many irons in the fire for my own good. Trying to focus on this. Don't want another year to go by without the game being done.

11/16/2022 Just Ego?

When the game I've worked on for four years doesn't even break the top 10 of my most hit pages. There's some obvious marketing problems, but putting that aside. For the first time in my life, I'm not sure computers and programming is my true path. Think I did a lot of work on Project Valkyrie based on my ego, trying to make the best game possible, but also doing it for myself. Well, I do want to entertain players and provide the best story I can. Still, it is mostly just for myself. That's been going contrary to other asepcts of my life where I am being more of service to others and what little reward I get from that really dwarfs anything I've received from programming including Project Valkyrie.

I would like to finish the game, but the motivation I had disappeared. I thought it would lead to some books and other games, it was too big of an undertaking for my first game. I am starting to feel my time is needed elsewhere and being more of service to people.

11/10/2022 Four Years of Project Valkyrie!

Yeah it's been a slow ride. A Labor of love on a part-part-part-time basis. Still, I have enjoyed my time working on it. Maybe sometimes the bugs get a little annoying. Still, I have learned new concepts and advanced my beginner game developer knowledge a bit each time. Hopefully it is not another four years of development to finish the game.

Looking forward to some new development for Chapter 7.

10/29/2022 Bug Hunt Running Long

It takes a while to play test the game and sometimes something unexpected breaks and it breaks because of something else not working properly. To be honest, it's not very fun. It is very time consuming and basically when I'm the only developer and working part-part-time on it. It becomes work like. I am also hosting my first fire walk next Saturday. So the past few months have been getting that ready and facing a series of challenges. I should be able to dedicate more time to these bugs tomorrow, but I wanted to give a quick update.

09/02/2022 Steering Problems In Game and Chapter Six

A couple of troublesome bugs are holding up chapter 6. I wish I had documented better and done more work on that code instead of putting it aside. Unfortunately, programming involves a certain cadence, which changes as we improve our craft. So, I hope to review the code over the long weekend and fix the problems.

I think the level is pretty challenging. The objects controlled by steering are not first-rate or anything, but far beyond anything game programming-related I've ever done. It's still my first real game.

Working on the pace of the asteroids a bit and want to make it complicated but not impossible. I want players to enjoy using multiple strategies to get the level done.

07/24/2022 Expanding Uses of my Behavior Tree

Probably the most flexible and useful code I have ever written for games or any other programming project. I find it fasinating when I could just group smaller decisions into larger ones. Instead of just unit AI, I'm branching it into game conditions and other in game events. There's a couple of moving parts and I needed to fix a situtation in one of the chapters, so other events can work properly later.

I know, I am overdue with a release. Just things keep cropping up. I think an exhaustive map of what I wanted to do in this game from the start would have been great. Still it is a learning process and I'm grateful for what I have learned.

06/25/2022 Reworking Code.

That's the problem adding stuff to a game after coding started...things break and other things come up. That's just the way that it is. Still a labor of love. Chapter 6 is starting to take shape. I used asteroids to plan and mark way points and then the Space Station's defenses took them out. I found that pretty funny. I'm what the hell is happening to my breadcrumbs? I had the wrong analytics setting, so there were zero hits coming in for Project Valkyrie and I was getting depressed about it. Hopefully that is fixed now.

05/15/2022 Chapter 6? When??

It's been over six months since Chapter 5 was released. I want to finish the game. I have enjoyed working on it, but it might be time to complete the story and move on. Tweaking things is kind of boring. I want to develop and draw new things. Promote it and see if it'll work. I think it's an ok game. Starts off a little slow. It might be a little too difficult on some levels. The commander might be a little brash and insulting. The story itself might be far-fetched. Still, I'm pleased to have developed it. I did an excellent job for my first "real" game.

So, chapter 6...early...mid June 2022?

04/29/2022 "If you build it, 'they' will come."

Well it's actually "he will come.", but he won't work here. Marketing has always been my weakest point. Spending a couple of years building a game and not promoting or marketing it, just makes this just an exercise. I would like to share it and get more feedback. I can't exist in a vaccuum and neither can this project. That just costs me resources, time, and the opportunity to do more with life and the game.

So promoting the game a bit and getting some feedback is becoming more and more important. That which doesn't grow, dies. Yeah I'm probably going to fail, it is probably going to hurt, but I'll do my best to keep going. It is past time.

03/28/2022 User Accounts and Loading/Saving the Game!

"I love it when a plan comes together." Hannibal's ending catch phrase from the A-Team. Yeah I watched that show when I was a kid. Things didn't exactly go to plan. My database server did not support JSON, so I had to use long text. My production server wasn't running the same version PHP 7.x that I developed in, so I had the server migrated. I couldn't create another database, so I had to change table names. I had to adjust a lot of other things on the fly. But at the end of the day, the result is the same. It is working!

There's still a lot of bloat in the save record, so I might address that next sprint before the hundreds of users start coming on board. Wishful thinking, I know. Still, I have enjoyed working on Project Valkyrie and hopefully will continue to make improvements. My objective has always been to make the best game I know how. The lessons I learned from this project are worth the time I invested in it. I look forward to working on it, every day!

Still the end goal is make games that people enjoy playing and focus on enjoying life and projects.

03/06/2022 Production Server Out of Date

Seriously thinking about changing hosting providers. I don't feel like they take care of my production environment. They have my server running PHP 5.x and before that it was an old MySQL. Plus I'm paying more than my other company's hosting provider for less. Been with them for a very long time and I guess that's the problem. I'm comfortable. It's an old environment and instead of keeping it up to date it sits on the shelf, but they are responsive when I contact them, so it is a difficult decision.

I also know, I abandoned things for a number of years. Well, I'm back and I need things to work for my money. So I'll be critical of things and hopefully it pans out, otherwise I'm done and moving someplace else.

02/18/2022 Login Testing

Loading and Saving seem to work well. So, moved on to the database tables for storing logins and have the login/logout features working. Next, I need to create some account creation forms. The sprint is over on Sunday, and I'm not sure I will have things ready by then, but I am getting closer. Just want to make sure the foundation is sound. I like developing applications that way. If the foundation is solid, it is more manageable to add more things to it later.

I didn't work on any game fixes. I guess looking back, I should have included something in this sprint. I just feel that not saving the game is becoming more and more of a problem, especially as levels become more challenging and the game takes longer to play through.

02/13/2022 Login/Save/Load Testing

So far, I have a primary database, an essential login function, and I have tested loading and saving the game to an extent. Going to be shifting to account creation and providing the player a way to pick a saved game. I'm following some of the ideas from my work application by having a dashboard as a starting point. Eventually, it would be excellent to have achievements, leaderboards, and other stuff on it.

I'm eager to finish chapter 6, but having the infrastructure in place is more important, so players can load/save their games instead of starting over each time. The end of this sprint is 2/20, so hopefully, I have something to show. Happy Valentine's day!

01/24/2022 Load Game Testing.

Nothing to show yet, but spent most of the month loading game data. Using a lot of the code I use for storing game data between restarts. Also drew some layouts of how I want forms to look and what data to collect. Think the first pass includes a lot of unecessary stuff. So plan to go throught it again and drop stuff we're not going to need to go forward.

Sometimes it is hard to get motivated to continue pushing on this project. It's going to be hard to be successful, I understand that. I've understood that for a very long time, but doing nothing is also a sure fire way to get nothing. Tired of nothing. Tired of my inner-critic and fear.

01/15/2022 User Accounts and Load/Saving the Game!

I know it is frustrating to start over each time. I kind of got so wrapped up working on the story elements that I forgot about the basics. So, in this sprint I've been working on storing the save games on the server. Then users can login and continue the game. Eventually, it would be nice to have some paid content, but being able to create an account and save your progress is good start for now.

01/02/2022 One Year Anniversary of Project Valkyrie's Soft Release

I remember putting in a lot of effort to make sure Project Valkyrie was released on my deadline, missed it by a day. I still work on it almost every day and I enjoy telling the story. It is something I have poured my soul into. I hope to add more this year and hopefully finish this part of the story. To develop a community and help it become self-sufficent would be great. Thank you for your support.

I tweaked chapter 5, it was kind of impossible before. Just too much going on at the same time. I thought it was kind of cool that I didn't have to update any code during the update.

12/31/2021 Happy New Year and a Bug Fix (0.8.3.2)

I wanted to update Project Valkyrie before 2022. Couldn't sleep this morning and started my day at like 3:30 AM. I eventually took a nap, but I really felt compelled to get as much done on this and other projects. Not sure why. I don't think we live in a time where we can afford to waste too much time anymore. I sure have wasted my fair share. So no, I'm not finishing a year without some progress.

I hopefully addressed some long standing bugs. Like upgrades not being kept between restarts, more fuel from a supply drone/pod, and a better pause menu. Players would lose be forced to start over if they ran out of fuel away from the station, which really would suck in the higher chapters.

Working on being able to save and load the game, that looks very promising. Wish you all a promising and Happy New Year!

12/19/2021 Chapter 5 Needs a "NERF"!

Listening to my older son, Jason, talk about games and use words like "nerf" "meta," and "sus." I realize I'm getting old. So, I use his terms to have fun and surprise his friends. He spends a lot of time playing Clash Royale and Minecraft with them. No, he hasn't given my game much of a chance. Neither has my younger son, Matt. It is just something Dad does, and what Dad does is tedious and work.

I have been working this weekend to get Chapter 5 out (even at the expense of racquetball) and had a couple of last-minute bugs I needed to fix.

I playtested the whole game. That's usually my acid test. Chapter 4 and 5 took a couple of times to beat. Well, I did it, but barely and with devastating losses. Not that I want the game to be too easy, but I think I overdid it this time.

I would like to get chapter six out for the door for the first anniversary in the next sprint. At the same time, having people play the game from the beginning each time will get annoying. I would like to grow a community for Project Valkyrie and other projects. Still afraid no one plays, likes, or supports the game. I dedicate all the time I can to it. I love doing it and would be very happy making a living from it.

12/12/2021 Chapter 5 Framing Done

I finished the introduction, the dialogs, added some additional features to waypoints, got the general level ideas down. Now, I just need to finish the level design and testing. I should be able to get to work on chapter 6, since I did a lot of the leg work already. So, I can hopefully use the two weeks before Christmas to get things ready!

Had to rewrite some parts since the story shifted slightly. During the whole creative process, I need to remain open and flexible otherwise things shut down quick.

12/03/2021 Twenty Six Hours and Counting!

This one card, SG206, has been one of the largest and most time consuming cards in Project Valkyrie's development. I should have broke it down into more managable sections. Behavior trees and this new unit have been a great challenge. I think, I am getting really close to finishing it. Moving it over to the "Done" column will probably require a celebration!

I have the week before and after Christmas off from work! So, I am looking forward to working on the game for most of that time. Well, going to schedule some fun time too.

Just going to take it one pomodoro (25 minutes) at a time and get it done.

11/21/2021 Almost...But Not Quite

I think most of the major bugs are gone with the Behavior Tree and the new AI enemy. Is it perfect? No. Is it challenging? Yes. Going to need to "nerf" things as my older son, Jason, likes to say. Working on AI with Behavior Trees has been very challenging and rewarding. I hope to have things done in about a week, there's a long weekend for Thanksgiving coming up. I've been breaking the rules with my sprints and running over. So, I should start another one.

11/10/2021 First Commit Three Years Ago

It doesn't feel like three years ago. I would say it has been kind of slow, chipping away at this half an hour here a couple of hours there. It's tough to step away and go to a regular job. I would rather keep working at this. I has been my dream since I started programming to make games. I would make them on Commodore VIC-20 and 64. From just BASIC to Gary Kitchen's Gamemaker. From Turbo C++ to Visual Basic with Direct X. They weren't real games just trying to learn new things and put them together. Project Valkyrie is my best game and I've put my soul into it and it feels good.

I wanted to showcase a new level with the long awaited new AI enemy, but it is still not ready. Behavior Trees are pretty awesome and I look forward to using them more often. I have a few more chapters to tell and then the game will be complete. It has been a lot of fun sharing this project with all of you. Thanks for playing my game. Looking forward to sharing the next chapter with all of you.

Oh yeah, the picture to the left is my first commit. Basically can move the Valkyrie up, right, left, and down using the cursor controls. It was a very humble beginning.

11/07/2021 Last Minute Changes

Just a quick update. I don't have to give away any more spoilers, but sometimes it is easier to map stuff out ahead of time than trying to change things after I started. Think there's also a conflict from where I started AI and where I am now. So trying to reconile things.

10/24/2021 Behavior Tree Improvements

I posted a couple of screenshots to our Facebook group. Basically a trail of steering triangles, joked I was going to make some fractal designs using them. Using the triangles as a steering behavior, based on the idea from Open Steer project, to avoid targets. It needs some work for sure, but it works.

Playing with Behavior Trees over the past few months has been a lot of fun. I always struggled a lot with AI and to make a dent is pretty cool. I want to get another level out for the three year anniversary of coding Project Valkyrie on November 10th, 2021, but we'll see.