August Status Update

August shifted back from a meta month onto a more even balance with development. For Hackagotchi, I worked on the new websocket backend to allow for real-time updates to player’s hacksteads, as well as started maintaining the new chat backend, Gotchinet. In other news, I’ve begun to move the FLL-Scoring codebase into a monolithic app.

Hackagotchi

Backend

Cedric¹ spent a few weeks working on a new Websocket API called “The Wormhole”. This will allow for our new non-Slack clients to receive real-time updates from our central backend, at a significant increase to our current client.

Moving to our own backend is essential to eliminating the limitations imposed by Slack, including an issue that’s been plaguing our players, namely that sometimes Hacksteads would fail to display, because of Slack limiting the amount of “Blocks” we can send to an app Home.

Gotchinet

Part of moving away from Slack is providing our own chat platform. Communication is such an integral part of the game, and I want to drive the creation of a community around Hackagotchi.

I’ve created an IRC² network for Hackagotchi, that is planned to be integrated directly into the standalone clients. The dev team has already moved over to it and we’re writing documentation to help our existing playerbase move over (something we’re expecting to be made easier by the standalone client integration). You’re welcome to come on and chat on KiwiIRC

FLL-Scoring

I’ve had some time to think since the last time I made a commit to the codebase, and in that time I’ve realized that making this app decentralized doesn’t make sense like it does for, say, SourceHut, in which each service isn’t tied to any other except the meta service. In FLL-Scoring, however, each service will be tied to another. You can’t have a Scoreboard without a Tournament, you can’t have Teams without Tournaments, etc. As such, I’m going to be continuing development of the FLL-Scoring app as a monolithic app.

My goals haven’t changed much though, I still want to build a fast and reliable app with minimal JavaScript. I still believe that’s possible and I will continuing working until it’s done.