georgegk

After I got all of the sandbox features working to my liking I realised that I needed some way to give basic notifications to the player. And so I designed a full notification system where the notification slides in, stays for an amount of time and then goes. It has an icon, a title label and then a text body all thought out to be as seamless as possible. I even thought of stacking multiple notifications so I made a stack where notifications further down it are displayed lower to not overlap and as soon as a notification dissapears all the other ones move up. For now the only 2 use case I have thought of are music info and achievments(yes that’s what I am going to be doing right after this). But now it’s getting a bit late and I have classes tomorrow so I am going to be signing off.. goodnight

I just realised I start every single devlog with after … but I can’t think of any better way. Anyways after I designed and made the sandbox menu slide in and out of the screen I went ahead and added some functionality to it, cause the buttons are pretty and all but pretty useless if I don’t wire them up properly. And so I managed to route the button clicks to my simulation engine (holy shit this architecture is getting a bit difficult to track, I have so many subscripts on the subscripts that I just spend my time figuring out the optimal way to transport info). I also had to make sure the green colour was always synced even if the buttons were destroyed and recreated by saving their state and finally make the simulation engine properly handle the buttons which wasn’t too difficult since most of the infrastructure was already there.

So after the last ship I realised that there is not time to waste if I want to get everything in for the lockin deadline so I got started on the next game mode, and that is sandbox. Now what I envision for it is basically the base oakridge map with a custom menu that allows you to trigger all kinds of cool stuff, like events and generator trips and cyberattacks ect. So I built a nice menu that you can open like the FNAF cameras if you have ever seen those, you swipe your mouse to the right and it slides open where you have a bunch of buttons you can use to control the game. You can see that in the video attached below.

Ok so I decided to integrate a few more random events. For starters I added a random line trip that can happen during the winter due to heavy snow build up. After that I decided to add a winter storm( or whiteout as I like to call them) that causes power demand to increase by up to 10% and increases the rate at which lines trip due to snowfall. That’s mostly it, other than that I rewrote some parts of the readme to reflect the new changes in control, random events and build the new executables for the release. After I uploaded everything I discovered a game breaking bug in the storm alarm and had to rebuild everything but it should be fine now.

So after my last update I went ahead and started to integrate that cyberattack random event but I realised that the tripped line alarm was not informative enough. What I mean is that you can’t easily pinpoint which line tripped since you either had to know each line’s name by heart or quickly opened every info panel and compare the name. That’s why I decided to make the tripped lines display a redder colour but still with respect to the voltage of each line. Then I decided that every 5-7 minutes during the cyberattack a random line will be tripped until you boot up and change to the backup center. 55-65 minutes after you switch the cyber attack will end (the expected time of end is displayed in the backup center’s info panel) and you can go back to normal.

Ok so after the last devlog I decided that to actually integrate that cyber attack random event the player needed to have the ability to manually transfer operations to the backup control center without causing a 15m control black out. The main control center now has 2 buttons, when you press startup the startup sequence on the backup center starts up and after it completes you press the transfer button put the main center on standby. Now to transfer the control back you just press startup and after 60 in game minutes control is automatically transfered back. Additionally I added a way for you to view at what time the center will startup, then copied the same system for the generator startups and lastly fixed a weird bug with the interconnect where the load bar was subtracting the import mw from the total generation instead of adding it (oops:))

Ok so I forgot to devlog for a bit but I have been working hard to implement a few new features mostly random events. My first one was a relatively simple one where you randomly get notified that a large vessel will dock at the port in 2 hours. This will marginally increase the power draw of the port load node by up to 200 MW and it will stay that way for 8 hours until it departs and the load returns to normal. Integration was not that hard since I already had a _tick_events() function that handled random generator malfuntions so I just added this new event with all the managment it needed, altough I am still trying to figure out the rate at which it should happen. I then decided to go with an event where cyber attacks by foreign actors caused your control to be interrupted but I then realised that I never placed down any control centers. So I went ahead and designed to icons one for the normal control center and one for the backup control center and placed them down near the center of the map manually creating 2 distribution lines connected to each center the central substation. The main center starts as operational and draws 90MW while the backup center starts as standby at a flat 10MW draw. If for any reason power to the main center fails the backup center begins a startup sequence to take over that takes 15 minutes. When the main center comes back online it starts at standby and automatically enters a startup sequence that takes 60 minutes after which it takes over and puts the backup center back at standby. Now at any moment that neither center is operational (backup center starting up, major power failure ect.) the user loses control of everything: All of their info panels are closed and they are prevented from opening new ones, the frequency gauge goes gray and shows N/A, the alarm panel clears and only shows “No operational control centers”, the status panel shows no score/generation and the gen/load bar shows nothing. This state is automatically reverted when a control center boots up but in the event that no center can the player has effectively lost. And that’s where we are at right now, this was a long one and there are more to come!

Ok so I didn’t do too much, I just updated the readme with the new info, pushed all of the project files to github, built the game for macos using github actions (took a while to get it working) and built the game for linux using my dual boot ubuntu. I also recorded and published a showcase https://youtu.be/BI512Jm9dFE

Ok so I was just testing the game when realized that I didn’t have any way to view the status of a specific power line. So I went ahead and made a menu that displayed that with all of its stats like status, voltage, thermal limit, load ect. But as I was looking around the map with the new menu I saw that every line had a load of 0. Obviously that shouldn’t be possible so I dug around my simulation engine to try and find an explanation. I won’t bore you with the technical side of things it was basically numpy silently failing when it recieved arrays full of zeros but I fixed that and everything looked good to go. But then I tried to trip a line as a test and the network beyond it somehow still functioned like it was connected. It was more technical math that was causing the issue so I decided to fix it by calculating which nodes where connected by active lines to the main substation and only allowing them to operate if they were. I then had to go to the generators and make them immediately trip and go to 0 if they aren’t connected, go to storage and make it disconnect and stop providing power if it isn’t connected and go to loads and make them disconnect and not have any demand if it isn’t connected. After that was fixed I saw that many power plants did not have any lines connecting them to the grid so I went and manually edited the map json to create a few new lines. And last but not least many lines would just immediately trip cause I set the thermal limit on most of them way too low and had to calculate new values for every line.

So I kinda forgot to devlog for a bit so here is a breakdown of what I did in those 4 hours. I first integrated the menu option fullscreen which I had literally no idea how to do but after googling it I just need to put a specific flag in the screen command so I messed around with different flags until I got a configuration that worked. Then I needed to integrate the different frequency options in the second option which required me to find every single use of frequency and change it to accommodate both 50 and 60hz. After that I had to find a few good royalty free songs for the soundtrack. I settled on 4 songs with 1 being a bit more fast paced. I then created a system that automatically plays songs and advances the current track index but has a fallback in case for some reason if fails to initialize the audio to prevent crashes. I also integrated the last option that simply prevented the fast paced from playing when enabled. Lastly I decided to add your battery usage as a factor to determining your score and made it so when you hover your mouse above the menu it displays a breakdown of what’s contributing.

P.S. I completely forgot about this but I improved the tutorial like a lot. I made your screen pan by itself to not cover the node you needed to click and highlight the menu of said node when necessary. Overall it should make it much clearer and more understandable!

Ok so I continued to work on the menu, trying to think of more ideas for the settings. I eventually decided on those 4 and built 2 other reusable input classes: slider and toggle button. The implementation wasn’t too complicated since I just copied the toggle class and made adjustments to fit each time. It took a bit to get each slider working but overall I am incredibly happy with this result

Ok so I don’t actually know how to frontend. I asked a frontend developer I know for suggestions and they told me to use daisyUi and this thing is pretty nice. I haven’t created anything of true essence yet since I am still learning how to use it but I got this like grid of cards to maybe format this a bit better or something. I have a few ideas on how to make this pretty let’s see what I can make.

Will write once I get on my phone

I read all of your feedback and I am very thankful for your incredibly high votes ❤️! I wrote down in my todo list all the suggestions so I will have to integrate those before I move on to the other features. Now I decided to ditch claude on the ui help and do everything myself so naturally I am way slower but it does feel better. I just hope I maintain the high quality. Right now I am working on the settings menu and I made a reusable toggle button class to choose the frequency.

Nothing much to say I just wrote up the readme.md and pushed everything to github. It was pretty easy, mostly a lot of copy and pasting from different documentation I have written up to help me with development and giving claude a final pash to have it polish it

This alpha is ready to be published. Now I don’t have all the features ready just the tutorial and simulation, but I want to get some feedback on the game and physics before I continue, that’s why I am going to ship shortly after I write the readme.md. In the meantime I added this tutorial with gates to guide the player through the mechanics and allow them to interactively learn the game. Lastly I also added a small disclaimer to the main menu when you boot the game that includes some important info about the current state of development.

After the last devlog I decided the simulation itself was good so I went on to build the game over screen and main menu. I started with the game over making it show your score and reason for failure and allowing you to either restart (click or press R) or return to the main menu. Now for the main menu I decided to show all the game modes I am planning and have described above and have them locked. All except for the Realistic Simulation which is the one I have developed currently. Now as you see I have high ambitions for this project and I hope I will be able to complete it. For now I am going to build the tutorial, see you later!

ok yeah it was in fact not functional. It was a lot of bug fixes before I got them to work without crashing but they eventually did. Now I realized that I had been applying the droop to the freq wrong so I fixed that, but then realized that I should have been applying it to _tick_dispatch so I moved it over to there, but then again realized that I had the inertia calculations and then finally decided that it made the game too easy so I removed and just kept some basic inertia. Now I also fixed other less note worthy bugs making this game more playable. I think we are approaching a point where I think I can somewhat ship this as a way to get feedback on the concept/gameplay/ everything else. Wait I also forgot to say that I added time multipliers that make the simulation run faster and retrofitted the time indicator to also show minutes

Ok so I finally got back into developing this game after finishing a couple of other projects and I am off to a great start. I started by trying to improve the load shedding simulation cause it was causing this weird oscillation going in a loop low freq -> load shed -> high freq -> load restore - > low freq but I eventually realized that this load/restore would probably make the game way too easy so I am thinking of maybe removing it and having the user manually shed and restore per load (right now I just have the trigger frequency at 50 meaning it just never gets triggered). Other than that I started work on the controls which I have scripted in but am like 95% sure don’t actually work without crashing the game (I guess we will find out soon enough). I had to do some weird spaghetti code to get everything properly wired up for the event loop so I got no idea what consequences that had for the rest of the triggers. That’s all for now let’s get back to it.

I know I haven’t updated in a while but I had a good reason. First I tried to change the db to dynamo db which took around 30m due to some small permissions troubles but then… I had to finally push the bot to lambda and let me tell you it was incredibly tedious/hard. First my libraries weren’t recognized fixed that, then I was told that some of libraries were compiled for windows and not linux so it took me an hour to figure out how to use layers. Then the handler didn’t work, it refused to be imported so I had to rewrite the bot to use sync and make lambda not exit out after the ack() was called which took another hour. And lastly the buttons refused to work, so I did a lot debugging, changed a lot of stuff and then realized that I was updating the wrong url and that’s why it was 404ing 🤦‍♂️. But I am happy to say that this project is officially ready! I hope you find as useful and fun as I did.

So basically I completed this feature that allows you to view and search up users. I added some QOL like maintaining the page after navigating menus and returning and allowing you to modify your query instead of having to rewrite it. It is a very nice feature I wonder why vanilla flavortown doesn’t allow you to do that. That’s mostly it, other than that I fixed a few stubborn bugs and started preparing for the push to production.

So I did some refactoring of the codebase to split the files a bit so I don’t have a 1500 line app.py, mostly into 2 big scripts, app.py and structures.py. The first one just has all the button and menu interaction logic while the second one has the build menus that compile all the info in the json schemes slack requires. Now I want to work on a fifth feature that allows you to view and search for users using their username. After that I will work into porting everything to the structure aws lambda demands. That’s it for now signing off

Ok so I nade the leaderboard using mostly the same logic as the discord version but adding an icon for each entry cause it looks way better. After that I decided to also include the page number so when you press back you return to the page of the leaderboard you left from. It was a bit hell routing it through the values of the buttons but I pulled through. I think I am mostly done with the port now that 4/4 features are here.

Last quick devlog of the day! Ok so I added the item specific page for the shop which was relatively easy since I ported most of the logic from the discord bot. This thing is really starting to take shape but it is getting way too late and I have to get up early tomorrow. I hope to ship within the day since 3/4 features are done! Goodnight

quick devlog time. I got the main page of the shop working with all the sort modes, page pagination, reverse… using a similar system to the back buttons. Most of the sorting logic was l ported from the discord bot, I just designed a new ui and hooked it to this classless system. That’s the big difference between this and discord.py since with discord I can just store any info I need in the classes and pass it on with tables but now I need to encode everything into strings and pass it using input values, but I am slowly getting there.

Nice I actually implemented the second feature extremely fast since I had ready basically all the build functions from the first feature. The back button was a bit complicated but I settled on encoding it into the button’s value and using .split(” “) when receiving the event to extract all the info. We are 2/4 done and are making great progress!!! I can’t wait to see the finished product it will look amazing!

I just finished building the devlog menu and I think I have gotten all the features I realistically want into this first option (explore). I am going to move on to the second option (projects) where I will finally have to confront that back button issue (let’s hope it won’t be too big of a problem this time cause last time it broke me a bit). I will get back to you with any updates I may have.

I continued working on the explore tab adding the per project display. It wasn’t too difficult just a lot of messing around with blocks until I got smt that was both aesthetically pleasing and functional. Now I obviously need to get that menu down there to link to the devlogs and then I can continue to the other 3 features that hopefully with this setup will be absolutely no problem (I think I am just coping). Now I remember the the back button menu issue from the original version but I have decided that that is a future me problem and I won’t be paying any attention to it for the foreseeable future.

I started work on the explore tab, it looks pretty good if you ask me, way better than the discord one. The banners where a huge addition that improved the quality of the whole bot. Now it is a bit annoying to build blocks cause even with the block kit builder sometimes it fails silently for no reason and I have to scramble to try and fix it but I think I am doing well. I got the search feature and the back button to work but not the project selector, on to that now!

Ok so I did some stuff over the past 1.5h. I changed the slack bot from sync to async to help with responses and tried to get the database to work. I spent like 5m trying to figure out why it did not save the keys and then I realized that I forgot to call init_db()🤦‍♂️. So the login system is finally working and I managed to get some basic interaction with flavortown. Now all that remains is to port the rest of the bot… (once again block kit builder is a live saver)

Woah slack bot development is amazing! I can’t stress enough how useful block kit builder is. In discord every time you want to test an embed you gotta restart the program and do the command but with slack you have the preview right next to your editor and it updates dynamically. I have to say I am falling in love with slack it is a very good platform. Now back to our topic I managed to recreate my homepage with slack’s blocks and added icons that I host using the hackclub CDN ( thank you to whoever created that you are a godsend). Now I will look into doing the basic login stuff.

So I tried switching the slack bot’s mode from socket to http, since I want to look into deploying it with aws lambda (Those railway prices are starting to become a bit much). I got it to work after some trial and error which gives me hope I am going to get this to work. I also went from message commands to slash interactions to hopefully give users an easier way of triggering the interaction and made the response only visible to the user that requested it. I got this!

So I finally fixed the last bugs on the AI and changed some stuff around to make the impossible level harder. I then decided to add some background music, which took some time to find smt that inspired me, and ended up with 2 songs that play the one after the other on a loop. It did take me some time to figure out how to use the pygame mixer but nothing I couldn’t handle. I then did some more testing, fixed a few last stubborn bugs, got an icon for the exe and window, compiled it and finally pushed everything to github. This project is officially finished (at least v1.0)

I saw some feedback asking for this bot to also be added on slack, so I decided that was a great idea and got started on that. Now have I ever created a slack bot before? No. Does that mean I won’t try to anyways? Also no. For now I have just managed to get this example working for my bot but it does have some good bones. I am sure this port won’t be too hard… right??

I tried to make all 4 levels of the ai but they aren’t that good so I will have to fix that soon enough. There are a lot of bugs and you can still pretty easily win at the most difficult level so I am trying to find ways to make a smarter ais cause apparently I don’t really know the meta for this game. This will be a lot more of research to get to the level I need for this game to be releasable.

I did not in fact add controls. I was about to but I got side tracked cause my simulation script has a lot of bugs. First of all I had to readjust the demand tick function to gradually move from hour to hour instead of instantly changing and making the grid collapse. I also had to add a clear alarms button since alarms just kept pilling on without being removed and I realized that load never got shed, since I have made a typo when reading the node data and the script thought that no nodes could shed. It took me a long time to find all those and there are probably way more I just haven’t noticed yet. This is more complex than I thought but I am still having a lot of fun.

log time, no log (or whatever the saying is). I finally made the Simulation Engine™ for the game and let me tell you it was a lot of math/physics. The only thing that saved me was pen and paper where I manually organized the formulas I was gonna use for this. I won’t get into it here but it’s a lot of math, swing equations and so on and so on (some I didn’t even know myself, google saved me). I kind of haven’t connected it to the interactive menus (or created any controls), expect for the HUD, so I don’t exactly know if it’s functioning or not, I guess we will find out soon enough once I connect everything together. I fear that I haven’t written _tick_dispach() correctly to account for wind and solar so I will have to correct that like right now.

I completed the rest of the HUD. It has a gen VS load bar in the bottom middle that shows out difference in production/ demand, a panel in the top left to show the time, season, day, and some production statistics and lastly an alarm panel that shows how much we are exporting/ importing and a few important alarms whenever they happen. This project is going really well however the complicated math is starting to get to me.

So I designed this analog meter to display the current grid frequency to the player, but then I realized that it is a bit hard to read so I also added a digital display and a label to describe the current state. I will also have those warning displayed elsewhere in the HUD but it’s nice to have them right below there too. I like this design a lot I feel like the colours just pop

So I made this nice info screen. It might not look like much but it took quite some time to have it all functional and displaying text (I just noticed that the label text can overflow, I only fixed the overflow in the content area), after all I had to make the program that read the saved map file and rendered the data. I haven’t talked about the map at all. So I want it to be totally customizable and be able to include custom scenarios that’s why I have decided to save the maps as .json files that the player can choose from.

So update time! over this 1.5h I decided that I didn’t want to load the icons as files but instead have them generated using python, so with some help from claude I designed this system that creates an icon for each type of node. Now it did take quite some time to figure everything out but overall I like the new look, it feels very pygamey which is what I am going for with this project. I have zoomed in a bit so the labels are visible (I will probably need to fix that overlap won’t I)

So I mostly worked on getting everything basic setup, I have brain stormed this project quite a lot and I have decided to base the main map around oakridge alaska (shoutout: Oakridge Nuclear Power Station you have been a great inspiration in this project that’s why I am giving you the main map). It is a “small” exporter city with nuclear, hydro, solar, wind and gas peakers a perfect combo to implement a variety of features. Plus the subarctic location allows for weather features and interesting ice/temp related challenges. This is nothing too complicated yet just some transmission lines, a pannable map and some random nodes.

Finally wrote up the readme.md, I am excited to ship this project. I have setup the project on railway and invited the bot to my discord server so people can easily check it out. I had some difficulties with the build (it’s my first time on railway) but I got it all to work after adding the req.txt file. This project was incredibly fun (even if I took a long break in between) and I can’t wait to see what else I can make.

I am happy to announce that this project is officially ready. I just finished some last code checks, testing, formatting and passed the code through claude to make sure I didn’t miss anything. All that is left is to now deploy the project, write up the repo and ship!

Just here to make a big update. I mostly focused on adding the ability to create and modify projects through the ui and adding sorting modes, regions and reverse direction in the shop. The rest of the time I spent was polishing the code to make it more presentable, remove repetitions, fix weird behaviors, improve performance and overall prepare it for production. I think I have added all the features I need and ironed out the major problems with the code all that remains on that part is to add proper logging and replace requests with async sessions. After that all that will be left is the readme files, improving some of the previous logs, deploying the project and shipping it!

Started working on the shop interface, got some basic sorting, region setting, page pagination and item lists. I also looked into the API docs and couldn’t find any way to connect an item id to it’s upgrades without getting rate limited so I had to give up on that idea. Right now I am trying to get a menu to show each item in more detail which shouldn’t be too difficult.

I added a menu to view specific users from the leaderboard, which I will probably reuse to just let you explore and find users, which was harder than I thought since I needed to properly use my existing functions, that needed some heavy modification to have that multiuse capacity. Along the way I encountered several bugs that slowed me down, both from the new menu and from old short sightings of me, but I managed to resolve them.

I focused on making a few final bug fixes and changing all the responses to defer first since discord enforces a strict 3 second response time without it. I mostly did that and added some page pagination on the leaderboard as well as some setup to be able to view info on specific users. That’s it for the night, logging off.

Fixed a lot of bugs, added a search feature to the projects tab, finished the my projects section(for now more to come later) and finally created the first prototype of the leaderboard

I added a way to view the devlogs and made menu navigation easier by creating return buttons

I created the explore tab that shows different projects on the platform. I also made a menu to select specific projects and see the details and I am planning to also show devlogs!

Here is our start. I have made some progress. I outlined the basic features an structure and made a menu to submit your user id and api key, which is stored and used for any requests that are made in the future. This is starting to look like a great project! (NOTE: I just saw the API update and found out that there is a @me endpoint, will integrate that for ease of use)

I figured out how to create a slider and created one that snaps at 4 positions to choose the Ai level and I have started to work on the first level of the Ai.

I did some final debugging and created the main menu and end screen. Right now the local and vs AI buttons do the same thing.

I made some progress on the player system adding both players playing in turns. I also made the scorecard functional, changed the available moves to blue to be more visible and fixed several bugs all around the game. Now I need to add some win detection and a main menu and the basic split screen mode should be ready!

I made a scorecard and figured out the general text and line drawing of pygame. Next I will have to make the rows clickable, set the scores and limit tries to 3

Researched and implemented the scoring logic to determine available choices. Additionally fixed another overlap bug when placing down dice

I added a few systems including a proper reroll and a way to hold dice from being thrown. I had to figure out how to do buttons and how to not have overlaps when placing the dice back on the board which was not too hard.

First steps
This is my first time with pycharm so this should be fun, I have had some very basic progress like setting up loops and so on