Project Fangorn postmortem

Now that Project Fangorn is wrapped up and on ice, its time for the postmortem.
What went wrong:

Didn’t feel like I was productive enough.
Went off on a tangent developing a prototype space based architectural abstraction over Google AppEngine’s datastore and refactored prototype code to use it.

What went right:

Produced space based architectural abstraction over Google AppEngine’s datastore [...]

Project Fangorn goes into the freezer

I’m skipping the back burner, and putting Project Fangorn on ice. I just pushed up the latest version to webgamesbyjosh.appspot.com. In that version the first of the general standing orders was implemented and I did a little of the work for the exploration feature, but the user just sees a message that it [...]

Project Fangorn Progress VI

I just deployed a new version of Project Fangorn.  This version uses the space-based architecture abstraction I created for GAE.  The only difference users will see is that the best case user command processing scenarios about about twice as fast.  Worst case is about the same as before.
While this version doesn’t have any new features, [...]

Space-Based Architecture for AppEngine

Several posts ago I mentioned that I was waiting to see which cloud provider would be up to hosting Project Fangorn first.  In my last two posts (one, two) I talked about some of the issues with testing web apps on the GAE platform, but I didn’t mention what it was I was actually testing.
At [...]

Google App Engine not up to the task

Update 10/24/2008: It appears that the mcycle consumption of datastore operations are not actually counted against the soft cap and that GAE’s admin console is incorrectly including the consumption of datastore operations when issuing warnings about excessive mcycle consumption.
Update 12/16/2008: It starting to look like the mcycle consumption values I observed in GAE’s logs [...]

Project Fangorn playable prototypical preview deployed

I just played through all my initial turns for the playable prototypical preview of turn based web strategy game codenamed Project Fangorn that I deployed to Google App Engine earlier today.  At this point you are confined to your majorverse (home base) and you can’t come into contact with other players; however, you can build [...]

Project Fangorn progress V

At this point, I’ve got all of the game features implemented that I wanted in place before publishing a prototypical preview of Project Fangorn onto Google App Engine.  Fours things remain before publishing the preview:

Implement robust cross-entity cross-request update mechanism for changes to entities that are not all in the same entity group.
Improve error handling
Update [...]

Google App Engine scalability that doesn’t just work

Now that I’ve got enough of Project Fangorn’s features implemented for it to be playable, I spent some time reflecting on the experience of utilizing Google App Engine’s datastore and it strikes me that there are things about it that actually don’t scale and its API does not provide it-just-works (IJW) scalability. In theory [...]

Project Fangorn progress IV

Game Design
In thinking about the exploits feature (as previously mentioned) I came to the conclusion that having players achieve singular global exploits by being the first to do something would give to much advantage to those who start a hear, round, or game exactly when it began.  First I was thinking about changing it to [...]

Light Web Strategy Game now codenamed: Fangorn

I didn’t really like putting the abbreviation for light web strategy game in the code to refer to this game (haven’t thought of a real name yet), so I decided to give it a codename. Been had been watching the LoR trilogy in the back round and was on Two Towers when I needed [...]