Shadetree Game Designer
Blatantly copying Borrowing some text from
Wikipedia:
The term “Shadetree Mechanic” is a general term for people who enjoy working on automobiles in their spare time, usually in their own driveway, taking up basic DIY upgrades as well as basic maintenance.
For the past few years, my online game
Artifact has been in a “holding pattern”. That is, the game has basically been stable and, for the most part, breaking even. And mostly ignored. For right at 2 years, the game wasn’t updated at all.
Why? Primarily because the game has been stable. But also because I’ve been focusing on
The Journal and the new Paintball Net project. After all, The Journal does much better than “break even”, and Paintball Net has an investor now who gets a bit antsy if there’s no progress. In other words: motivation isn’t lacking (external motivation, anyway; sometimes internal motivation wanders off and does its own thing).
Also, Artifact went on the backburner because my partner in Samu Games, my brother Dug, bowed out of the company at the end of 2005. Since we first started working on the game in 1996, Dug was the server-side programmer and I was the client-side programmer. With Dug out of the picture now, it didn’t look like there was much more going to happen to the game.
So, yeah, holding pattern. Keeping it online, and hoping it didn’t intrude on the daily routine too much (besides payment processing; someday I’m going to have to automate that better; still, handling money doesn’t bug me so much).
And then …
Oh, yes. And then.
It was a long weekend, not very long ago when my server host for Artifact abruptly decided that they were moving their facility. From one in Florida, to one in Texas. And since that meant we were moving to new hardware, with a new IP address, suddenly I’m struggling to get the game moved. We hadn’t physically moved hardware in several years. Nothing like trying to remember what paths and files and sticky bits need to be found again and moved and put back in place properly.
I didn’t appreciate that, at all. That’s now somewhere on my list of 25 Worst Ways to Ruin a Perfectly Good Weekend. I’d been told there would be more time to move. There wasn’t. I didn’t appreciate that either.
In the end, though, we didn’t lose anything too important. Just some statistical information from 2002 through 2007, and one Wiki (not related to the game, just cohabiting the server) got hammered.
Anyway. New, more modern hardware sounded good. Now that I was there.
Sadly, no.
After 2 weeks, it was clear that the hardware wasn’t up to the task of hosting the game. Players were yelling loudly and I could almost feel the heat of the server melting from a distance of 200 miles. Fortunately, the host kicked in a free RAM upgrade, and a bit of CPU tweaking, and that helped.
The players calmed down, and my own blood pressure reduced back to more normal levels.
Still, so much for letting Artifact alone and it leaving me alone.
Having spent 2 weeks in a row worrying about the game, I figured, “Hell, while I’m here…” I dusted off the accumulated list of bugs and feature requests and spent a week updating the client software.
Oh, there’s *nothing* like looking at code old enough that it could be in middle school by now. But I managed, and the first update in 2 years went out. Followed the next day by the first emergency bug-fix in 2 years.
Then, I did something I had never done before. Not once in the eleven year history of the game.
I looked at the server code.
ANSI C, for the curious. And put together pretty well, I think. Three cheers for Dug.
Then I made my first, very small changes to the server code. In vi. Because that’s how hardcore Dug is. (I’ve since downloaded the source code to my laptop. I will use vi if I have to. For years in the 1990’s I used to use vi professionally, on a daily basis, and I can still swap “stupid vi tricks” with the best of ‘em. But … well … it’s vi. <shudders>)
After some IM back and forth with the departed Dug, I got the project built, and even figured out how to deploy the new executable.
And here’s the point of this whole, rambling post: Now I’m hooked.
With the release of Artifact 2, we parameterized much of the game. Combine that with a growing familiarity with the server source code, and … well …
I get to tinker. I get to flip switches, change constants, and then set the players loose on the changes to see how they like ‘em (or don’t). The core of the game won’t be messed with. Much. But outside of the core, I can see a lot of room for twiddling. And maybe even improvements.
I don’t know that Artifact will ever grow back to the heights it saw in 2002 and 2003. But I think it could have some life left in it still. It’s still fun to play–in a charming, old-enough-to-be-retro, life-sucking kind of way.
And it’s fun to play with.
I guess I’ve started modding my own game. Is that a new form of dogfooding?
-David
