Where We Are: the Month in Numbers and What Comes Next

This series opened with one month, four games and one engine. This post closes the account, with numbers you can check and with the pending items named.

The month in numbers

Commits between October 2 and 25, by repository:

• Castle Arena: 149, from October 2.
• Castle Survivors: 188, from October 6.
• Custom Hero Survival: 95, from October 10.
• Line Tower: 33, from October 9.
• Kastle: 116, from October 9.

About 580 in all. What they hold:

• Castle Arena: 14 factions, 15 arenas, 7 languages, a map editor, 48 options in the mode builder.
• Castle Survivors: 90 weapons and 3 extras, 97 upgrades, 36 enemies, 9 bosses, 17 worlds, 28 tower challenges, 29 achievements, 5 languages.
• Custom Hero Survival: 122 of 122 abilities, 11 shops, 1,085 tests in 49 files.
• Line Tower: the whole 12.1b ruleset, up to 12 builders, 4 nebula skies and deep space.
• Kastle: 164 creatures with 705 skins, 235 effects, 1,115 scenery models, 22 worlds, 74 sounds, 948 tests, 4 languages.

What is pending, by name

• Castle Arena. The new economy, AI and field are in the code, but the faction rebalance on top of them and the Training lessons that lost their pace are not yet. It all ships together, in one release. After that, the Steam page.
• Castle Survivors. It is at test-build state. What is left is what only testers show.
• Line Tower. Names, art, sounds and texts are provisional; its own universe is the next step.
• Custom Hero Survival. Three of the eleven soak scenarios with boosted bots do not finish the match, and MODERN keeps growing over CLASSIC.
• Kastle. The games still use their own orders and abilities; adopting the engine's is what lets each one retire its scripts. The simulation in a worker waits until a real game measures its step at peak. The Studio still picks a game's mods folder only through an environment variable.
• Infrastructure. The repositories are private and CI minutes are counted, so the performance gate runs on the machine, not in the cloud, and every CI run is weighed before it is spent.

How we worked this month

The pace came from working on several fronts at once, each with its definition of done written before it started, and from measuring before changing: AI-versus-AI matches by the thousand, determinism tests that run the same match twice, a lint that refuses what would make two computers disagree. When something broke in CI, the cause was followed to the end, even when the culprit was a GPU watchdog on a server with no GPU.

What comes next

The order for Castle Arena has not changed since post 13: recalibrate the factions, redo the lessons, run the full battery in the lab and release everything at once. For the other three, test builds in the hands of people who play. And this diary returns to its normal rhythm, one post per subject, now with four games to draw subjects from.

Thank you for reading this far.

— The team