days like these

Well I expected debugging and testing to be a bit of a drag, but I didn’t realize how hard it would hit me. The relative “high” of pushing out a basic game was quickly squashed by the daunting task of making sure things worked properly. Being that I am relatively new to development in general testing on this scale is quite a shocker. It isn’t like school algorithms and programs, where the answer is either right or wrong, with some boundary checks sprinkled in to ensure users can’t screw around. No, this is far more deep and complex, I don’t even think I could imagine up all the little ways someone could screw up my ruleset.

I’m frankly quite a bit lost. It was easy enough to say that I would be debugging and testing until evaluations, but I don’t really know what, or how to do that. Be gentle on me here, but what sort of tests/playtests should I be doing? Do I just play the ruleset a bunch with myself, trying out little things? Do I come up with a whole bunch of “things to try” and do those in some playtests? Do I write methodical unit tests to do every single thing in every combination?

Mithro mentioned in a comment on yesterdays post that I COULD script the text client, but I that I can also look into creating an AI. I decided to start playing around with the AI and consequently spent/wasted almost my entire day trying to get it up and running (not MY ai, just an AI in general.) I also spent a little while playing with the text based client. Its not entirely clear to me HOW to use the client, any pointers on that would be appreciated. (I’ve connected, logged in, even selected objects, but I haven’t been able to “play” with the client yet.)

UPDATE: Well shucks (yeah I said that) I got tpsai-py working with the version 0.2.x branch of libtpclient-py. Someone let me know if that is too far back. I’m thinking Risk is simple enough I can throw together an AI in a day or two.

As far as this week has been going in general it hasn’t been as bad as it feels. I did make a lot of small fixes yesterday, and any bugs I’ve ran into I’ve been able to fix. As bad as I feel having “wasted” time failing, if I can drudge through and get a system going for testing things will be far easier in the long run. At present I am not completely satisfied with display, and am hard pressed to find a way to show users connectivity more readily.