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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