What did we do last week?
- Adding icons to cards: commands now also have icons instead of text for arguments. Also now all cards have descriptive icons.
- Added CLI hints to some earlier levels, that help people who're really interested in learning that stuff.
- Demoweek preparations! Build a title image, cut the final version of the trailer
- Add a glow effect for cards that have not been played yet, as an incentive to try them.
- Did another playtest, with a person who knows a lot about UX and interfaces (which we totally didn't know before!) – got some pretty helpful feedback for final polishing, and our playtester how has a better concept of what branches are! \o/
What do we plan to do this week?
- Checking out what content is needed for a steam page
- Updating the itch.io page with new content
- building a press kit and writing to possible multiplicators (github, etc)
- minor improvements after jan's playtest; prioritizing issues we found in the playtest
- Do a final retrospective on how the project went, what we would do differently next time, what we wouldn't change :)
What's blocking us?
- Bit sad that the funding phase is now over!
- But otherwise, we're pretty happy with how this project went.
What's motivating us?
- Curious whether we'll get more feedback from organizations or companies about the game!
- Seeing the results of all other groups in the demoweek
What did we do last week?
- We recorded and cut a trailer
- Went through the feedback we got through our feedback survey after FOSDEM. 18 people wrote in, which is awesome!
- We extracted actionable points, and fixed the most important ones.
- We wrote an article for Demoweek. It was super interesting so make videos and screenshots of the different progression stages.
What do we plan to do this week?
- Some more preparations for Demoweek
- More polishing and Bugfixing
What's blocking us?
- The pandemic is so annoying :( When schools re-open, we'll probably have another, stronger lockdown in a few weeks...
- blinry has a tooth procedure this week, so we'll have to see where we'll move our work day.
What's motivating us?
- Demoweek is coming :D
What did we do last week?
- Polished the beginning of the level sequence a bit more.
- Designed a new "monster" representing the HEAD pointer. Our nickname is "Hörnchen", it's an owl-cat with horns ;)
- We're going with the name "Oh My Git!". One technique that seemed helpful for making a decision was to actually put the name on the title screen, and see how we like it. We disregarded the name "Git Guru" after that, because it seemed a bit... boring and old-fashioned?
- Adapted all the links. The repo is now here.
- Initial logo design. Have a look! :D We might dial the excitedness down a bit again.
- We gave a talk at fosdem \o/ People generally seemed to like the idea! The number one wish was to have an in-browser version, one suggestion for how to do that was wasm-git.
- We checked out the music a friend created for us and chose our favorite track for refinement
What do we plan to do this week?
- Check feedback survey entries, and prioritize incoming wishes :)
- Writing a short text for the demoweek website
- planning the trailer
- Polish levels some more. This is a bit of an endless task, but also really important.
- Polish the appearance of all playing cards
- Plan the last and probably final playtest session
What's blocking us?
- We can't think of anything. :)
What's motivating us?
- All the nice feedback from the FOSDEM talk :3 We've been working towards this for a while, and it's nice to see it pay off!
What did we do last week?
- Set up a feedback survey where people can give feedback after they've played the game. It's automatically displayed when you quit the game.
- This would be a really good time for y'all to try our Git game, if you want! You can find current builds for Linux, Mac, and Windows here!
- Brainstormed more things about the story and the setting
- Investigated how we could create a "certificate" for people to print after they've played to the end.
- Registered as a developer on Steam, which involved filling out a looot of forms. Doing it as a GbR should be fine, we think. Now we're waiting to be reviewed. Interesting to see how this works from the inside!
What do we plan to do this week?
- Prepare for FOSDEM: set up a site with all the links people could be interested in
- Pick a name! :O We made a poll, where you're super welcome to add your suggestions and vote for others! Some of our favorites currently are something like "Oh My Git", "Git Guru", "Ghost In Time". What do you think?
- Design a logo
- nice graphics for slash screen
- design a new pet/monster
- polish the content of the first 3-4 levels
- Get lot's of feedback
What's blocking us?
- At this point, we've used up all the time we will be paid for via the Prototype Fund, which is a bit of a downer. Still we're pretty motivated to put in time this month.
- We don't have a good overview of the current levels and their status. We'll make a big table with checkboxes of what's left to do tomorrow.
What's motivating us?
- Seeing all cool projects at Demoweek \o/
- Looking forward to the FOSDEM weekend!
- The feeling that everything is coming together pretty much for this project. :)
What did we do last week?
- 2 Gameplay tests: one participant was extra excited to learn more about git on a command line \o/
- Minor Layout changes and polishing
- Implemented badges you get when you solve levels using only the CLI. They are golden and sparkle.
- Added hints that explain gameplay elements when they appear for the first time.
- Read a bit documentation on how to release games on Steam. We're not sure whether we can register there as a GbR yet.
- Made all fonts a lot prettier
- Did a little brainstorming session about the story and overall aesthetic
- Recorded FOSDEM talk :) It'll be streamed on 2021-02-07 at 14:40 UTC+1!
- Check-In meeting with Tasmo
What do we plan to do this week?
- Build a feedback survey for people who play the game without us watching. We were really inspired by the Chatmosphere survey. :)
- Storify the existing chapters better
- Add more chapters?
What's blocking us?
- This week, blinry will be at a "Make Your School" event and teach electronics stuff to kids, this takes some time away from the game (but is also pretty fun!)
What's motivating us?
- Showing our game at FOSDEM
- Got pretty great feedback in our playtests
What did we do last week?
- Polished the level sequence for playtesting
- Sent the second payment request
- Performance optimization! Loading level now should be ~6 times faster!
- Test under Windows and macOS
- Had a playtest, which was really helpful for helping us polish things.
What do we plan to do this week?
- Quick check if we can optimize something in the overall layout
- Implement badge system (level only completed by terminal commands)
- Create and link feedback survey
- Create steam page
- Brainstorm for story?overall design aesthetic
- FOSDEM Talk preparations and recording
What's blocking us?
- Not really a blocker, just general frustration about the virus situation.
What's motivating us?
- Still playtests :D Have another one scheduled for today.
What did we do last week?
- Covered most things we want to teach with simple levels. It's not super complete, and the levels don't have "story flavor" yet, but we're getting there. :)
- Remember which levels are solved and mark them green.
- Start restructuring the chapters to give a gentle introduction to Git.
- Set up two playtests for this week!
What do we plan to do this week?
- polishing levels and level sequences
- Coaching with John
- Performance Optimisation (we might calculate stuff that we are not actually rendering)
- Implementing interactive terminal commands
- testing on Mac and Windows
- Playtest Session
- Preparing and recording a lightning talk for FOSDEM
What's blocking us?
- Political news take some attention and focus away :(
What's motivating us?
- Playteeeeests! We picked some folks this time who are relatively new to Git.
- Again: it's very convenient to have a big master plan :D
What did we do in week 16?
- Made a big master plan of everything we still want to do, and assigned the things to weeks. Seems like quite a lot of work, but doable, and we have two unplanned buffer weeks :)
- Implemented a general "hint" system
- Extended the level format so that goals can have multiple components, which are displayed
- Built a general "trigger-action" system, so that we can build more interactive levels – a "friend" who reacts when you push to their repository, for example
- Built a simple title screen and level picker. It's still ugly, but it works!
- Sent out a talk submission to FOSDEM
What do we plan to do this week?
- Cover all the things we want to teach in the game with simple test levels
- Optimize the screen layout
- Remember which levels are solved in a "savegame", and mark them green or something
- Different levels: cards vs terminal
- Sandbox mode with all cards
- Organize playtests for next week
What's blocking us?
- We can't think of anything :P
What's motivating us?
- The master plan makes it easy to know what to work on when
- Looking forward to the next playtest!
What did we do last week?
- Call with y'all! :)
- Looked at PuzzleGraph for inspiration of which mechanisms we could use
- Had a long brainstorming about all different variations our 2D world could have, and sketched some levels in ASCII style. It's hard to find a balance between an exciting world and not straying too far away from Git.
- In particular, because we still want the player to be able to use the command line to solve the puzzles, we'd have to prevent certain types of "cheating", where the player can just edit or copy files.
- Having a "2D world" seems promising because it would often allow us to have very clear goals for the levels - "get to the exit", for example. In the current version, the goals are a bit more fuzzy - "make a merge that results in a file which has these specific properties". But for some concepts we want to teach, we didn't really find good rules/levels that enforce that the player uses Git in a specific way.
What do we plan to do this week?
- We'll take some time today to build a roadmap for the last two months!
- What we'll do today will depend on that. :D
What's blocking us?
- We've been doing some conceptual work in the last weeks - because we're thinking about what the next steps are, we can't work efficiently on implementing them, but we think that's okay. :)
What's motivating us?
- Having some cozy days around Christmas :D
What did we do last week?
- Vacation \o/
What do we plan to do this week?
- Think of a few 2D puzzle mechanisms, implement them, play around with them to see what's fun
- Submit a lightning talk to FOSDEM, which has finally opened submissions :)
What's blocking us?
- Nothing in sight :)
What's motivating us?
- Curious what we'll think of the current status when we look at it with fresh eyes :)
- Requested the first payout today :D
What did we do last week?
- We played 5D Chess With Multiverse Time Travel to see how they solved some GUI problems that are similar to our cases.
- Thought some more about what the rules in the 2D world should be like. Looking for a balance between making it simple and interesting.
What do we plan to do this week?
- We're on "vacation" this week, except for the call! :)
What's blocking us?
- Still not super clear where to go next. We have some ideas, but might schedule another coaching?
What's motivating us?
- blinry notices that a planned vacation is really nice! Hasn't done that in a while.
What did we do last week?
- Brainstormed on a high level about how a "2D world" would work and what you could do in it. There might be levels about unlocking a chest with a key, and the key is actually a GPG key?! :D
- Thought about which incentives we could have for moving from the visual playing card interface to the command line. Commands like "rm *" might be well-suited, because they demonstrate the power of the command line?
- Thought about high-level game structure: there might be two alternating styles of levels: the ones in which you learn new Git stuff in an "official" setting from your teachers, and can use the playing cards. And then, you get levels where you need to apply your new knowledge in a different, more personal setting - maybe playing pranks on people, being sneaky and tricky - and this is where you can use the command line to "trick" the game.
- Created an inventory to take files through time \o/
What do we plan to do this week?
- Drag & Drop item combination
- Try building a few levels with what we have, see what already works and what's missing
- Look for inspiration on how the 2D world can work or look like
What's blocking us?
- Godot's GUI nodes still feel cumbersome to use. We need a lot of time to wrangle with them, which is time we'd rather spend on making actual content for the game...
What's motivating us?
- We saw this tweet about a 5-dimensional chess game, and someone mentioned that there should be a Git UI like this. That was a really good moment to plug our game, and people seemed interested!
What did we do last week?
- Fixed MacOS crash caused by a non-existent option for 'sed'
- Creating a 2D scene for more fun interaction with files. The player can walk around and create/delete/manipulate objects that represent files.
- Show a combined view of the working directory, of the index, and of the last commit, with halos: the current files are white objects, the index versions are blue halos, the last commit is a faint shadow. Seems like a promising way to build more intuition of how these three interact.
- Had an enjoyable chat with Marie, thanks for that!
What do we plan to do this week?
- Try adding more properties to the 2D objects (something like "what is the character saying right now?")
- Creating test-levels for the new 2D file scenes
- We're considering putting the finalized game on Steam in the end. Might look into how all of that works :)
What's blocking us?
- Nothing in sight ^_^
What's motivating us?
- bleeptrack's job at university runs out, so there's more free time and more energy :)
- Trying a new direction of having 2D objects in the game is exciting! :D
What did we do last week?
- Playing cards can now have string parameters, which enables a number of new cool actions, like
git branch [string]ortouch [string]. - Wrote some new levels, which explain how to create/delete branches, and how to work with files (create, delete, and rename them)
- Making all fonts 15% larger – this was based on feedback regarding accessibility we got.
- A friendly person opened a number of small issues in the GitHub project, we fixed them.
- Adding shader to target halos so players can better see where they can drop their card.
What do we plan to do this week?
- Fix MacOS crash (see github issue #9)
- Write more levels, which explain concepts we haven't covered yet.
What's blocking us?
- Nothing this week :)
What's motivating us?
- Talk submissions to FOSDEM might open this week, we're thinking of doing a lightning talk or something. :)
What did we do last week?
- Started working on the bug that randomly crashes the game: we removed a possible error source, but the bug is still there. :O
- The file explorer can now also show the index and indicates the current file status (new, modified, conflicted) via symbols
- We noticed that our playtesters sometimes didn't know where to drag the playing cards to run commands. We added a functionality that highlights the "valid" drag targets (commits, refs, or files), which should help with this problem.
- Current builds of the game are now automatically deployed to itch.io!
What do we plan to do this week?
- Look some more into the random crashes. This is high priority! :D
- Write more levels that teach how to use the index. We're curious how well the playing card interface scales up when you have more cards.
- Some fancy glow effect for the drop areas.
What's blocking us?
- Nothing in sight :)
What's motivating us?
- Results of the US elections! We're pretty relieved!
- It's pretty neat that building this game helps us get a deep, intuitive understanding of Git ourselves! :)
What did we do last week?
- Building Prototype 3 with lot's of polishing: horizontal level layout,
- More graphics: Symbols on the playing cards, an "avatar" in the form of a small monster instead of "HEAD"
- Restructured the high-level layout of the screen a bit
- new levels with the time travel topic
- 2 Playtests on Friday:
- People generally seemed to like the "time travel" theme :D
- People were a bit confused by file explorers for the working directory and on the commits. We might just unify them?
- Some early feedback on how to improve accessibility - our fonts are probably way to small.
- Wrote a short Twitter thread with a gameplay video and links to all the resources
What do we plan to do this week?
- We have a strange bug that occasionally crashes the game - without any clear error messages. We need to find and fix it! :D
- Visualizing Card Targets
- How could we extend the level format to allow hints during the level?
What's blocking us?
- Nothing factual, just some virus and election anxiety?
What's motivating us?
- We seem to be on a good path, according to feedback from our beta testers!
- We are happy to have quite a clear view what our next steps will be. Feels good :)
What did we do last week?
- A lot of debugging on Widows :D Had a very stubborn bug, but we found it in the end. The game almost runs on Windows again, just need to solve another problem related to command execution.
- Visual File Explorer for a nice graphical representation of different commit states, of the index, and of the working directory. This should be much more beginner-friendly!
- Wrote a short sequence of levels where the player is a time travel agent and can help solve temporal paradoxes. We thing this approach is promising: it very quickly makes you focus on the content of commits, which, in the end, seems quite important.
- Failed to find people for playtesting this week, but we found at least one for this week.
What do we plan to do this week?
- Playtest on Friday
- Polish Timetravel Levels, maybe add a few advanced ones
- Improve the playing card system, to more closely integrate it with the level sequence
What's blocking us?
- Some University deadlines, but they are over at the end of October :)
What's motivating us?
- Playtests \o/
What did we do last week?
- Implemented a "playing card" interface, inspired by games like Hearthstone: each card contains a command, like "git push" or "git checkout", and if you drag it into the game (or on a commit), it is executed. Definitely fun for ourselves to play with! We are not sure yet whether this is an interface we'll really use, but it could be neat to be able to give new cards to players as a reward - "here's your git push -f card" :3
- Recorded Dev-Log #2
- Wrote as good as a README as we could, which describes installation instructions, and how to contribute!
- Added the Contributor Covenant and the Blue Oak Model License.
- Made our first payment request.
What do we plan to do this week?
- Building new levels in the "time travel" theme
- Test whether the game still runs on Windows, probably make slight tweaks, have our CI produce Windows builds
- Plan and do a new round of playtesting!
What's blocking us?
- Virus-related anxiety :(
What's motivating us?
- The prospect of having people playtest is always motivating to get the game into a more polished state! :)
What did we do last week?
- Tested the game on macOS, and made some tiny changes that allow it to run there!
- Automatically compile executables and deploy them to github pages
- Add some missing shortcuts for convenience, like Ctrl+S for saving a file, and Ctrl+W for deleting the last word.
- We had our first coaching session with John from Zero360 \o/ Main takeaway: He motivated us to try more graphical interface systems for interacting with Git repos, like something block-based, which would be friendlier to people who are really new to the command line. Maybe we can then gradually transition to a "pure" command line UI?
What do we plan to do this week?
- Experimenting with graphical UIs
- Decide on a license :) We tend towards something pretty permissive?
- Finish up some documentation.
- Record a new dev (v)log, and invite people to try to build their own levels
What's blocking us?
- Nothing in sight ^_^
What's motivating us?
- Getting the game to run on macOS was surprisingly straightforward! :)
- looking forward to play with fancy GUI stuff
What did we do last week?
- Thought a bit about possible other game modes, like a "deck building" game, where you play cards that say "git reset --hard HEAD", for example. :P
- Added the possibility to split levels into "chapters".
- Implemented a new level format, which should make it easier to write new levels - for ourselves, and for people who want to contribute!
- Clever node positioning to get better graph layouts.
- Command line switch to start sandbox mode in one of your own projects (git-hydra --sandbox=.)
- A lot of code refactoring, to make it more maintainable.
What do we plan to do this week?
- Documentation! Add a README, a license, and a CoC to the project, and explain how to contribute code and levels.
- Probably fix a lot of bugs along the way. ;P
- We plan to be able to invite community-contributed levels by the end of the week.
- Check out how to bundle git with our godot game on Linux to ship it with a current git version.
What's blocking us?
- How to balance learning and fun? The coaching this month might help get us more insights.
- We didn't make progress on allowing interactive commands (like
git add -p). It's lingering in the backs of our heads a bit.
What's motivating us?
- Looking forward to a next gameplay session and user generated levels :D
- We're excited about giving the game better visuals – might go in the direction of a solarpunk aesthetic?
- The realization that interactive rebasing... just... works already!
What did we do last week?
- We built a file explorer, so players can better understand how their repository folder changes
- Started building a simple autocompletion mechanism, which should help players remember Git subcommands
- Learned more about how Godot's UI system works, polished the appearance a lot and started building a simple "theme"
- We recorded a first Dev-Log video where we show and talk a bit about our progress: Dev-Log #1
- Built a "sandbox mode" with just a terminal and a visualization, which is optimized to record simple explainer videos. In a first example, we talk about what git replace does.
What do we plan to do this week?
- Plan which features we want to include in the second prototype.
- Sketch some new ideas for how puzzles and levels could work.
- Continue improving the autocomplete feature.
What's blocking us?
- Interactive commands are tricky to implement in our terminal. We tried different approaches and have a somewhat working version, but are not yet completely satisfied with the result.
What's motivating us?
- Seeing interest in the dev-log video was nice! We got a few new people interested in doing playtesting, as well as our first (very valid) issue.
- We're generally really interested in learning about all the obscure features of Git ourselves! :)
What did we do last week?
- Some polishing of the UI
- A lot of polishing of the level sequence. At this point, we have levels that explain almost all Git internals, with the exception of annotated tags \o/
- First playtesting with two experienced Git users!! Main takeaways:
- The game seemed to work on their Linux machines, which is good. We found a small problem that seems fixable.
- They didn't seem too annoyed with the UI or our terminal, which is good ;)
- We definitely need a built-in documentation, because people will forget the commands we teach them quickly: a cheat sheet? A man page browser?
- What is the motivation of people who are new to Git to play the game? Should we explain things top-down for them, starting with the commands they will actually use?
What do we plan to do this week?
- Implementing a first prototype of a "cheat-sheet" so that users can write down important commands or information
- Learn more about Godot's GUI system works in detail
- Try writing a series of high-level introduction levels?
What's blocking us?
- Not really blocking, but after this prototype, there are a lot of directions we could proceed in, and it's unclear which is best.
What's motivating us?
- The Playtests and showing first prototypes to others :)
- Working together on this project is really fun and works well. We're basically pair-programming all the time. :)
What did we do last week?
- Getting the game to run on Windows! This was something that seemed difficult, and which we wanted to get out of the way. Fortunately, just plugging in the portable version of the Git Bash instead of /bin/bash seemed to work pretty immediately. :)
- Implementing "win conditions" for levels. They are simply bash scripts that are run on a repo and either exit with code 0 or 1. This mechanism allows us to have a playable level sequence.
- When considering which dependencies which we can build on, we found that because Git depends on Perl anyway, we will always have Perl. This will be useful for writing little helper scripts, and we switched our "fake editor" to Perl.
- Wrote one of the prettiest lines of code of our lives... This is a workaround for an unfortunate quoting behaviour on Godot's side, but should fix the problem.
What do we plan to do this week?
- How can we communicate with Git processes that take input while they are running? (For example
git add -i.) - Polish level texts and appearance a bit, so that we can show it to the very first alpha testers! :O
What's blocking us?
- Working with a Windows VM is not pleasant, and really slow. blinry might want to install Windows on a real machine.
What's motivating us?
- Getting uncertain technical problems out of the way first feels good and the project overall feels more doable :)
- We're looking forward to the very first test runs! Curious what people might say, and whether the game will work for them!
What did we do last week?
- We're starting out by building on top of a horizontal prototype for the game we had built when writing the application.
- Investigated a technical risk: how can we trigger commit message editing from within the game? We settled on using the
EDITORenvironment variable to communicate to the game from Git via TCP... - Implemented a simple structure for levels, with a description, and shell scripts which create a goal state and an initial state.
- Refactored out the logic that visualizes the individual repositories, so that we can draw multiple of them next to each other.
- Built a simple game view that displays the goal repository and the current repository, as well as a terminal that takes commands.
What do we plan to do this week?
- Look at another technical risk: can we bundle the game with Git binaries for multiple platforms, to make it standalone – especially for Windows?
- And another one: how can we communicate with Git processes that take input while they are running? (For example
git add -i.)
What's blocking us?
- Nothing in sight ;)
What's motivating us?
- Seeing that hard (and maybe a bit frightening) problems can be solvend and we found technical solutions for them.
- Many people filled out our pre-project survey and gave super helpful input! :)
- General excitement for finally starting with this project!
- We're planning to participate in a tradition in the indie gamedev world, where you post about your game on Saturdays, with the hashtag #screenshotsaturday. Here's our first post with a video!
What did we do last week?
What do we plan to do this week?
What's blocking us?
What's motivating us?