Last year Skirmish coding hit a major fork in the road.
THE FORK:
On the verge of pushing a major update to the current Steam build, we thought we’d be able to add the next four decks to the game, just a few stray stability issues to nail down first.
Those “stability issues” turned out to be the tip of a gnarled iceberg of spiderwebbed dependencies and completely out of control “god-class” style programming. Functionality for basic game features was spaghettified throughout the entire codebase, making simple corrections impossible. Redundant commands were scattered ad-hoc throughout different areas of functionality, seemingly sometimes at random, seemingly sometimes maybe with some kind of unknowable intent. A full audit revealed that creating future expansions would be almost impossible, many more mechanisms would fail under stress than currently were obviously doing so, and even basic features like chaining cards during gameplay would frequently collapse the structure. With the improvisational nature of how the code was excreted, these flaws were built into the structure. Correcting them would be like trying to surgically extract a meandering thousand-foot-long strand of detcord from within a poured cement foundation.
After a much needed shift in coding personnel, we were left with a choice.
Slap duct-tape over the cracks and continue building on top, or overhaul the whole thing essentially from scratch.
You can probably guess which path Vivid took.
GAMEDEV EXECUTIVE DECISION:
We could have gotten flashier updates faster if we continued piling content into a flawed framework. But it would be difficult (or impossible) to address stability issues, and every new deck and card mechanic would multiply the instability. The only “good” path was to refactor thousands upon thousands of lines of code. To the point, now, where literally almost none of the original code exists. Well over 10,000 lines of code have been removed, and several more have been replaced, over the past year.
Although it’s not the type of work that lends itself to visual updates, it has been happening nonstop. Progress has been good, and we are nearing a point, finally, where we can start developing new features again, this time much more quickly with much more testable and stable results.
If you want to play the most recent build on Steam, PVP is enabled! Hop into the Skirmish Discord (link) warm up with single player against the AI, then match your skills against another player. If you want more fine-grained updates, the Skirmish discord posts them regularly. But we wanted to share this more broad public update to let everyone know Skirmish is silently but surely shaping up.
