With my starting usage of Claude last month for handling the text-based scripting language, I decided to start pushing it. The result? I think I’ve done roughly a half of a year or a year of work in a month. I’ve learned a few lessons that I think are worth sharing, so I’ll throw them up front before I get to the bulk of updates.
The biggest lesson is that AI is definitely here to stay — but it can make you dull. I still prefer to do a lot of changes on my own. However, it is effectively a “force multiplier” (as we would say in the self defense world). I’m already very fast and can get a lot done, but with AI, I can effectively make copies of myself to get “more” work done. Is it always good? It just depends. I’ve seen some people just blindly use it and bad programmers essentially write a LOT of bad code. Good programmers, if not concrete/constrained enough, may put out MORE code, but it might be bad. So the important thing is to create good boundaries and be wise.
Effectively, it has made me a “true architect” in every sense of that word in programming. Instead of being the one writing the code, I can dictate and give high level constraints/boundaries and details on what we’re trying to accomplish. It effectively gives me a team to do the programming work. When properly constrained, that team follows my stylings (usually — again, I make sure it runs ALL changes by me first, and I supervise the output), purposes, and patterns.
So, let’s get on to the meat and potatoes of this month.
We finally got one of the big features everyone has been asking for, for a LONG time. We have a 3D Map Editor and it runs fairly well! There are still some weird edge cases where it seems to not understand “where” something is being placed, but I feel that we’re within the 99% realm here, where 99% of operations make sense — and if you hit a weird edge case… you rotate the camera a little bit and it’ll work fine. It’s just the “depth” sorting that can be a problem — and that’s going to be true of any engine. That’s the $100,000 problem.
Additionally, I added post-processing effects for video. Originally, this had started at something like maybe 9 or 10 effects and has shot up to almost 30. Y’all have asked for a lot and I’ve done my best to make sure we got them. Our very own Tolin has an environment he put together and wanted to use Cel-Shading on… and here we are! We have Depth of Field (for you Octopath lovers), Anti-Aliasing, Film Grain, and so much more. I’ve honestly lost track of all of what we’ve added. It has been a lot.
In probably one of the least sexy presentations, I added a “Battle Test” to Enemy Formations in the Database. This has been requested for a very long time and has been desperately needed for that same duration. This one required reworking how the engine works entirely, and then passing things across layers appropriately, but I’m pretty satisfied with the result. Your party configuration is (generally) saved, but you’ll persist it if you start the battle or apply. You also have the ability to revert the changes or reset it entirely.
You’ll notice that this looks a lot like the New Game setup for Characters… and that’s because it is! I unified how these two worked and put them together into one reusable component, because it was worth doing.
There were NUMEROUS updates to the documentation, which is taking just a little longer than I had hoped for. I sacrificed that in order to get you all of the new features above (and bug fixes, a few new commands, a few new behaviors, etc). However, the big news on documentation is that it’s actually pulling everything from the code itself now. What this means is that there is a “single source of truth,” rather than documentation that might come from the documentation website and differ from what you see in the editor.
I had Claude also write an engine and editor around documentation itself — which saves topics on every item — and it understands the overall structure of what we have. I have the ability, now, to export everything to whatever format I want. If I decide I want to have a wiki, it’s ready. A PDF export manual? Totally doable. Videos…? OK, that may be harder/sillier, but the documentation is all composed as data now. It’s just a matter of cleaning up some of the details on verbage/explanations, and then I’ll be able to export it.
One of our moderators, tehhairbuns, is working on the “copy” (a fancy term for what an editor does to an article before it’s published) and painstakingly going thru every topic we have. There are ~480 topics right now. That’s a LOT OF WORK.
That being said, please look forward to it in the future. It is coming. I’ve bribed offered her a feature that was supposed to come in post-1.0 for her efforts… So, you might see something that has been asked for very soon, beyond the 3D Map Editor.
I’ve done (basically) no work on the 1.0 project — not even writing. The goal shifted to setup the infrastructure for documentation to be able to be handed off to someone else to clean up and make notes, etc. I even used Claude to write some tools around this, so the sync-up is much better and managed.
Next month, I plan on really buckling down on the 1.0 project. NO MORE DISTRACTIONS (there will probably be some). Hopefully I will have enough of the documentation “cleaned” and ready for sharing and showing. If it’s “done” enough, I may even migrate the internal documentation to lead to it as well. I’m looking forward to this being “good” and “ready” for everyone to start using.
My plans for April are simple — the 1.0 Project (Dungeon Crawler Edition) — and fixing anything small with the features I’ve added. As updates trickle in for the documentation (re: Copy), I’ll be able to automate putting that on the server — or outputting it to a PDF — or maybe directly beaming it into brains… we’ll see!
That’s it for March! That was a wild ride!
As always:
Thank you so much for your support so far. I’m looking forward to building this community further and giving you the engine you may not have known you always wanted!
