Post jam

I've always been really personally interested in incremental games; there's something fundamentally satisfying about passively making progress while I do other stuff, upgrading, and coming back. I've wanted to make one of these for a while, but I haven't had the chance and I've sort of feared the development outside of a bog standard game engine like Unity. However, I've recently been doing a fair amount of full-stack web dev stuff, and I felt it was time to attempt it. 

I found and began using Phaser3 as my main framework. It uploaded nicely to Itch and had decent enough documentation for the very basic things I needed to use it for. Honestly it was probably overkill and I could have just began using HTML canvas, as most of the logic was pretty standard JS, but I didn't want to end up dealing with a bunch of minor screen space or personal function issues when I could delegate that to Phaser. 

All in all, Phaser is pretty nice. I didn't really run into any issues with it, and it seemed much more competent than was frankly necessary. My main issue was refactoring. I had bright design decisions at the beginning for a fairly trivial incremental game, and I think my compartmentalization of the different views and the text drawing was pretty smart, but I still ended up doing a lot of fairly similar code across my 4 views, and if I had designed it with all the facets of an incremental game from the forefront, I think I would have ended up with a lot less duplication, and a lot less poor design choices, vis a vis the automation entities and the upgrades. 

I'm actually decently happy with how the front-end looks at least, though it's functionality is lacking in my opinion. The big things I consider missing are tool-tips, and tabs. Switching between different views all together would be more expensive, but considering it's mostly text, that's not as much of an issue.  Tool tips are mostly necessary because there's a lot of cluttered text on screen, and minimizing it while still allowing it to be viewed would be a much better outcome.

The back-end logic needs to be heavily refactored, and probably more deeply extended, so I minimize the code duplication, but that would require me to think about this more. I'm still happy with most of the core ideas, it just sort of fell apart more or less as I approached the ending. The real two crucial things that needed to be done before I would consider this more than a prototype would be gating progression- i.e. can't buy shipping upgrade 2 until you've shipped 200 packages, etc. etc.- and saving, which I've done before, but never for something this particularly complex, especially considering the gated progression and the fact that hopefully you could continue to earn offline. 

In the end I'm fine with it. I might come back, but I also like looking at it as what can come out of 24 hours of work on a new engine and a new game type. If you wanna see the source code, it's up here: https://github.com/ThomasSeaver/Packremental I don't honestly recommend looking at it in its current state, and I know there are quite a few things wrong with it, but feel free to mess around with it.