Kandria

Various Updates

I only have very few issue tickets left, and most of them might also be turned into wontfix at some point. Either that means Kandria is now very stable, or... we haven't had enough testing. I'm leaning towards the latter, so if you're part of the beta programme, please give the game a shot! It's content-complete and we also finished a polish pass on all the tiles, so it's well and fully playable already.

So, in the meantime I've started working on the stretch goals, most work being done towards the source code release. I want to ensure that getting Kandria set up for development is as easy as possible, and there's a lot to be done for that.

One part of doing this is backporting stuff into Trial, the game engine. A lot of things have accrued in Kandria that are of general usefulness, and I'd like to get those folded back into Trial.

Another part of it is documenting Trial. I've started writing documentation for some of its subsystems and features, and I'll be continuing that effort as I move ahead. You can find the documentation here: https://shirakumo.github.io/trial

Then, Kandria makes use of several libraries that haven't been released yet, and some libraries that require newer versions than are easily available. To fix this, I've continued work on Redist, a system to make it easy to distribute custom versions of libraries. It's complete and just needs some testing now.

After that, one step will be to separate out the assets from the code in Kandria's repository. That won't be done until December, as I'd like to keep the maintenance burden down for the rest of my teammates, and restructuring everything now while they're still working on polishing the content doesn't sound like a good idea to me.

That should cover most things blocking the road to the source release. For the modding support there's a lot in addition that needs to be done: a UI needs to be developed that lets people use the mod.io service directly from within Kandria to manage, download, and upload mods. That alone is quite a lot of work, though at least I already finished writing a client library to interact with their services.

After the UI, or perhaps before it, I need to finish my build system, Forge, as that's required to make dynamic compilation and loading of mods actually workable. Common Lisp does already have a build system, ASDF, but it is not designed for this use-case, and it shows. Forge has already made a lot of progress over the years as I've worked on it on and off, but there's still some loose ends and a ton of testing left to do.

Because of that, the editor will definitely be released before the modding support, but that, too, still needs a lot of polish and stability work. Not that it's terrible as it is now, but for sure not as convenient and snazzy as I'd like it to ultimately be.

Aside from those, I've also started thinking about localising Kandria into German. It's likely that I'll end up doing that, but translating over 30k words definitely isn't anything to laugh at, either. Especially considering that, while I am a native German speaker, I hardly ever write in it anymore, being far more used to English.

Anyway, I'll have made a decision on this, and a more detailed roadmap, ready for you in the monthly update next week! See you then, and please remember to playtest Kandria if you have beta access, it would help us a lot. Cheers!