Spankers and Spankees,
I’m currently working on some fairly major extensions/modifications to The Potion Wars‘ engine, and at this stage I’ve sent the game out to my editor (Emily) and beta testers (Johny741, and Uninventive).
Unfortunately, we’ve run into a problem where the changes I’ve made to the game have made it incompatible with PlayOnMac. I have absolutely no idea how to fix that, or even if it is fixable without dedicating all my time to it.
It’s patently absurd that the woman who has volunteered some of her precious free time to edit my game can’t then play it. So, I’m looking for someone who owns a Mac, and is moderately tech-savvy, who could compile the game from source.
What you would need to do:
0. Receive from me a zipped file containing the game’s source code, plus some third-party stuff you’ll need to compile the game.
1. Make sure Python 2.7 is installed on your machine (I’m 99.999999% sure it comes pre-installed on Macs these days).
2. Download and install Pygame.
3. Execute a command on the command-line that I give them.
4. Basic troubleshooting, so I don’t have to try to fix any compilation errors you come across over e-mail (obviously I would be willing to help with any errors you find, but the more you can fix on your own, the faster the game will get compiled).
5. A willingness to recompile the game every time I come out with a new version. Note that this should be much simpler than the first time. All you’ll need is the updated source code, and any new songs/images that I add to the game.
Ideally, I’d also like it to be someone who knows/can figure out how to use git so that most compilations are as simple as pulling the most up-to-date source code off of git and executing a command on the command-line.
If you’re willing to help, you get the following “perks:”
1. A name of your choice under my Acknowledgements page in the game.
2. The (rather buggy) next version of the game a week to two weeks (depending on how buggy the new release is) before anyone except the beta testers.
Furthermore, if you’d like to also be a beta tester (since you’ll have the new version of the game at the same time as the beta testers anyway), you can be. Just let me know that you’re interested in that as well.
If you’re interested, then please send me an e-mail at sprpgs@gmail.com.
Would it be possible for Emily to edit whilst you’re searching for someone to troubleshoot? There’s no reason why such a great game should be delayed by something like this.
Don’t worry, this isn’t delaying anything. I have two other beta testers who use Windows. They’ve found a mess of bugs (some very major) in the latest, overhauled version. I’ve fixed those bugs (hopefully. One of them has been a stubborn bastard, whose survived one round of bug fixes already). They’re doing another round of playtesting right now. Hopefully, I’ll have a new version posted by late next Friday, August 9. It won’t have the next episode, but it does have quite a few improvements.
In fact, technically, Emily won’t even need to run the game to edit anything. I’m currently working on writing a scrip that will convert some custom LaTeX to Python, so she can edit the transcript of the next episode as a PDF/HTML document, which I can then automatically convert into Python code for the game itself.
Great to hear that. The progress and effort is appreciated. That it’s well written, lore and especially scene wise, is important. Was the bug leading to crashes in battles when using certain spells? Thanks. Looking forward to more.
It wasn’t (those bugs are quite nasty though, because battle is so damned random. Stupid randomness. What you do for me?). It was a problem with scene transitions. I’ve reorganized the game’s state to make saving and loading states cleaner and less error-prone, in the long run. Unfortunately, it took me a while to realize that I forgot to make sure the game was actually saving the number of the current scene! So after beating the dungeon, people would jump back to the initial assault on the guild. Then they’d start the dungeon in the armory, and bad things would happen.
Games are complicated. Good thing I’m a sadomasochist.