tl;dr: Give me ideas to work on!
Hello! As some of you may have noticed, I've been around a bit these past few weeks, chatting with some of you on IRC, etc. That's a result of me having (finally) taken care of a few small problems that were preventing me from working on the game.
In case you're curious/interested about the background: It started when I relocated for ~8 months during Covid. I didn't bring my desktop, but I bought a cheap laptop and did some small game development things on that. Not a lot though (obviously). Then I returned home, but I was still working remotely and got tired of swapping cables to switch between my work computer and personal desktop, so my desktop (which is my main development machine) stayed offline for a long time. Fast forward to a month or two ago. I bought a KVM (these devices are amazing if you have multiple computers), dusted off my desktop, applied new thermal paste to its CPU, updated its very-outdated operating system, and started finally poking at the game again. My first order of business was to do various infrastructure upgrades. We're now on PHP 8.2 and many of the various libraries/utilities that the game depends on have been upgraded to latest versions as well so that the game remains stable and fast (brag: I find the speed of everything in the game remarkable compared to the sluggish bloat I feel on many other more "modern" sites). The upshot is that all this behind-the-scenes modernization makes it much easier to do future development work.
That brings us to today. Now for the fun part! I'm looking to get back into actual feature development a bit. My track record isn't great and I know things have been slower in recent years, so I'm hesitant to make any big promises, but...hear me out:
What do you want done? I have some time off from work next week and want to spend a chunk of it on the game. I don't play this game and am not plugged into the day-to-day anymore, so I want to hear from all of you. Feel free to suggest stuff or +1 other people's ideas. You're the best people to know what's going to make you enjoy the game more, what you find annoying, what you always wish had been done, etc. And don't worry too much about whether something is going to be hard to build - I'd like to understand what people really want first. After that, I can think about the cost tradeoffs of building stuff. Of course though, smaller stuff is more likely to get done sooner.
I'll kick this thread off with my own ideas, but treat these as just a starting point for you to suggest your own:
- Move the game onto HTTPS so that you stop getting browser warnings
- Fix PayPal integration so that you don't have to wait for me to give purchased stars
- Revamp the designed-in-2010 UI to take advantage of typical monitor resolutions in 2023 (probably wider UI + bigger font...I find myself using 125% browser zoom on here)
- Move chat from IRC to Discord
- Change account structure so that you can manage a fleet of bots from a single login
- Daily quests, weekly events, etc.
- Promote the game more and optimize for new player stickiness/retention
- Train an LLM (a la ChatGPT/Bard) using forum data and do something fun with it
- Anything that was never implemented that you'd like done?
- Anything that's broken that you'd like fixed?
- Anything to improve mobile support? (maybe even an app one day?)
- Anything else at all?
