I always knew I had to do CI/CD for my development, but I just hadn’t given any priority yet. As such, until now I was still manually exporting Hypnagonia when I had a stable release, then manually uploading the html to my own site through scp, ssh to the site, and copy the files to the web directory. All so that I can link people to a bland page so that they can play the game online.
And for more feature-packed releases, I would also export the versions for Linux, Windows and mac, create a new github release and upload them there.
It was an unnecessary manual procedure and it always bothered me. But I had other priorities on my end and I kept pushing back the improvement on that end.
That is, until yesterday, where I run into this video introducing DevOps practices to game development:
And that kinda shamed me into going through with it.
Unfortunately interacting with my own webhost was always hacky and felt amateurish. So I decided to onboard Hypnagonia to itch.io. This provides me some benefits. As part of the community there, I can start getting more organic discovery. It provides some interesting metrics and very imprtantly, it’s an estabilished platform which means there’s plenty of guides and products to integrate it easily into my Continuous Delivery pipeline.
Unfortunately, I realized that embedding the game into itch.io doesn’t play well with my current viewport size and the “static” way I had designed it. And that was a rabbit hole…
First I adjusted my main menu screens to adjust automatically according to the viewport size. That worked OK-ish for not ridiculously-small resolutions. It’s fine, we can look at that later
But then I discovered that even small reductions in the viewport, make the cards look massive, as they are never scaled. So I needed to shrink cards according to the viewport size somehow…
Long-story short: I spent around 6 hours yesterday just giving the Godot Card Game Framework functionality to handle smaller resolutions somewhat gracefully. It’s not perferct, but it’s good enough to allow itch.io embed.
And since I was at it, I made some quality of life improvements. And wrote about them into an itch.io devlog.
I’m going to be writing some devlogs there now and then. Not sure how I will handle the integration with this blog. Maybe just post a link to them here when I write them? What do you think?