Game thing progress #6, the first public release, automatic builds, and other things

Here I am again, with another post. Since the last time, the game actually saw its first public release on itch.io, as well as its source code and assets have been made public on github under the GNU GPL 3 license for code and the CC-BY-NC-SA 4 license for assets. Go check them out if you want, the code has quite a few intersesting places. And of course, you can now actually play the game for yourself :)

The whole story from the original .org file is now in the game and playable, which includes the first two days. I'll probably be working on expanding the story further soon.

Now, for the actual changes that happened since the last post.. When testing on Mac OS, I was told that the game actually didn't work, because the libraries it needed aren't usually there on user systems. So I had to learn how to make bundles for Mac OS. Luckily, CMake has a few nifty things to help with that, namely the fixup_bundle function from BundleUtilities which automatically finds the frameworks needed for the game and copies them into the bundle, together with the game binary. It's used like this:

install(CODE "
include(BundleUtilities)
fixup_bundle(\"${CMAKE_BINARY_DIR}/someone.app\" \"\" \"\")
" COMPONENT Runtime)

This means that when running make install, CMake will fix the bundle for me. Apparently, it has to be done on the installation step for some reason, which caused quite a bit of trouble because when you use add_subdirectory, the install target also installs all the things from those subdirectories. And nobody says how to fix that! I found an answer on some old CMake mailing list.. apparently if you add EXCLUDE_FROM_ALL as the last argument to add_subdirectory then it won't try installing things from subdirectories! So I added that to all the libraries that tried doing so.

Also in the process of building for MacOS, a friend of mine, who was basically the one who made it work on MacOS initially, discovered that lua from the lua github repository isn't actually meant for other people, but for lua developers, because it's missing a lot of things that are in the normal release tarball that is on the lua website. So, he replaced the lua submodule with a call to ExternalProject_Add that would download and build lua from that tarball. That made lua a lot easier to build on all systems, as there are now no hacks like compiling lua with gcc manually, it all "just works" if the correct platform is passed to the lua makefile.

Another small change that had to be made for the game to work with MacOS bundles was making it change the current directory to the one the binary is in, so it can find the resources directory. This means that the game can now be launched from anywhere, which is a good change for all systems, but crucial on MacOS because bundles run in a directory where the bundle is, not in the directory where the binary is.

Another interesting thing that happened is that I finally figured out why the game was segfaulting when closing, but only in release mode. The C++ static class members were to blame, and SFML in part. Apparently, SFML fonts implicitly depend on an OpenGL context, which, by the time the static destructors are run, is long gone! So making the static class members not static and passing them explicitly where needed fixed the segfaulting.

Another small quality of life change to the dialogue system format has been made: the answers of the player previously had to always specify the next line, even if it was a numbered line that was easy to figure out, which now it does.

Previously, the help text that said things like "Press 1 to continue" was shown inside the terminal with the same color as the character speaking, now this text is outside the terminal. It is also used in an all-new line type: text input line. This line has some "before" and "after" text, and between those the player can input some arbitary text with the keyboard (and the help line says they can do so)! For now, this is used to allow the player to input their name, and other characters will refer to them by that name. The name is saved in the same place all other variables are, and is inserted into text when the text is created by using Lua's string.gsub to replace things like <p> with the actual value of the variable p (which is the variable used for the player name throughout all of the story, but also it's the default name if the name input is skipped).

And now.. for some pictures! A debug menu has been added to simplify testing (for now, only for the terminal mode), the debug menu uses Dear ImGui and the imgui-sfml library to make it work with SFML easily.

Here is how line switching looks: you input the whole name and it switches the game to that line (very simple and very useful!):

And here's how the variable menu looks, allowing to see variable values (and even toggle boolean values, though this is an old screenshot where this isn't yet implemented):

This menu is toggled by the tilde key, I left it in releases too, just in case.

The shaders for the walking part have been changed a bit, so now there's one shader with the computer screen light and one without. It's not the best solution probably, but it works for now.

The environment images have been disabled for the release because there aren't enough of them to cover everything yet, I'll bring them back when I have some more, but for now they're copied to the release but now shown

A lot of optimization work has also been done before release, the terminal part now works in more-or-less constant amount of memory, reusing as much as possible (not creating new text objects and recalculating them every frame is the biggest optimization probably). Many calculations that are used a lot have been cached, for example the size of the terminal frame is only recalculated when the window size changes, so it might even only get calculated once and then just be reused all the time.

Now a little bit about build automation: itch.io has a very usful tool called butler, which allows publishing on itch.io automatically and easily. I just download and unpack the archive on the autobuild machine, do ./butler push <release_dir> vaartis/someone:<channel> --userversion <version> and it uploads the difference between builds and makes them available under the new version, also hiding the old one. This works surprisingly well and I had basically no problems automating and using it, so all release builds (tagged as releases on github) are now also automatically published on itch.io. Since the initial release, I've made two bug fixing releases which were automatically pushed to itch using butler. Big props to people at itch.io for making such an easy to use tool.

And.. I guess that's all for now, even though the game isn't popular or anything judging from the itch.io statistics, that's really to be expected. I'll continue working and improving it. Thank you for reading my blog post!