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GDW 3: Working Base
It’s far later into the evening than I’d hoped for at this point, but all of my tasks from the first 6 hour milestone are complete.
GDW — Github Repo
For those following along at home, I’ve added a GitHub repository tracking the development of Scavenger Wars over the weekend. Due to licensing issue with some 3rd party assets I’m using for prototyping, this repository is only going to contain scripts and data that I develop for Scavenger Wars, so it won’t work out-of-the-box just yet.
GDW 2: First Milestone
Design Doc: Scavenger Wars
Concept:
Hybrid race / collecting / combat game set inside derelict spacecraft. 2D overhead space ships in zero gravity; small arenas with environmental hazards. Single player against AI, possible multiplayer. (more…)
GameDev Weekend 1
This weekend is the first I’ve had entirely free for a while, so to stave off the inevitable encroachment of boredom I’m going to be making a game with the new Unity 3, and because this is the internet: blogging about it in an almost-live way.
My goals for this weekend are to complete a functional prototype (no fancy graphics, entirely placeholder art and sound effects), to implement as many of the gameplay mechanisms from the design document as possible, and to have a lot of fun.
To get started, I’ve been rummaging through my ever-expanding collection of half-done game design documents, and decided on a concept I named “Scavenger Wars” as something that is both achievable and offers enough complexity to present a decent challenge.
Django and Postgresql Performance at WooMe
At WooMe, we’ve been using Django and Postgresql in anger for coming up on three years, scaling up to tens of thousands of queries per second means we’ve had to look long and hard at Django’s database support to meet our needs.
Our performance tweaks have run the gamut from simple queryset changes, through changing Django’s transactional behaviour, right the way up to writing our own table partitioning and master/slave replication support long before multidb support hit Django trunk.
Of biggest impact so far was rewriting Django’s transactional layer to allow database transactions to commit automatically and run with PgBouncer as a connection pooler.
10 Tools That Make Django Better
The last few weeks I’ve been experimenting with different Django setups, which virtualenv makes trivial. (If you’re not using virtualenv and virtualenvwrapper for Python development, the secret is to bang the rocks together guys!) My goal has been to create a reusable project framework for quick social experiments that provides the following features:
- External authentication, to exploit as wide an audience as possible without the hurdle of requiring registration.
- Useful debugging information, both through logging and in-page debug.
- Database schema versioning and migration.
- Asynchronous task queuing and control.
- A lightweight WSGI HTTP server to sit between Django and Nginx.
- Straightforward deployment.
- Messaging, so that users can communicate with one another.
- Friends / social groups, so that users know who they want to communicate with.
- A rewards system, to reinforce and drive positive activity.
