Lisplog

Elm-book – books with markdown and embedded elm components

via Elm - Latest posts by @choonkeat on Mon, 19 Jul 2021 07:49:24 GMT

wondering what constraints made you choose to reach for needing <component with-label="???" /> in the markdown string

|> withComponents
    [ ( "Default", view props )
    , ( "Disabled", view { props | disabled = True } )
    ]
|> render """
Buttons are pretty amazing, right? You can click them and stuff.

Try clicking on this one:

<component with-label="Default" />

They can also be disabled! Unbelievable.

<component with-label="Disabled" />
"""

vs rendering them sequentially, e.g. perhaps like

|> render
    [ Markdown
        """
        Buttons are pretty amazing, right? You can click them and stuff.

        Try clicking on this one:
        """
    , Component (view props)
    , Markdown
        """
        They can also be disabled! Unbelievable.
        """
    , Component (view { props | disabled = True })
    ]

just the fact that I can click on the netlify link and see what the readme words is talking about, greatly lowered the barrier for me

Write CLI scripts in Elm (IO Monad)

via Elm - Latest posts by @jwoLondon Jo Wood on Mon, 19 Jul 2021 05:35:01 GMT

I found the andThen pattern to be quite readable and avoids those wildcard parameters:

module HelloFile exposing (program)

import Posix.IO as IO exposing (IO, Process)
import Posix.IO.File as File
import Posix.IO.Process as Proc


program : Process -> IO ()
program process =
    case process.argv of
        [ _, inName ] ->
            -- Print to stdout if no output file provided
            File.contentsOf inName
                |> IO.exitOnError identity
                |> IO.andThen (processContent >> Proc.print)

        [ _, inName, outName ] ->
            File.contentsOf inName
                |> IO.exitOnError identity
                |> IO.andThen (processContent >> File.writeContentsTo outName)

        _ ->
            Proc.logErr "Error: Provide the names of the input file and optionally an output file.\n"


processContent : String -> String
processContent =
    -- Do something with the content of the input file here.
    String.toUpper

Write CLI scripts in Elm (IO Monad)

via Elm - Latest posts by @aszenz asrar on Sun, 18 Jul 2021 19:22:06 GMT

This is really cool, I think elm while being frontend focused should still have support for clis scripts so that the community can make frontend tooling in elm itself. That would really drive the tooling ecosystem forward.

Elm-book – books with markdown and embedded elm components

via Elm - Latest posts by @rjdellecese RJ Dellecese on Sun, 18 Jul 2021 15:41:37 GMT

This looks really neat, thank you for building and sharing! Do you have any thoughts on how it compares to GitHub - kalutheo/elm-ui-explorer?

Elm-book – books with markdown and embedded elm components

via Elm - Latest posts by @georgesboris on Sun, 18 Jul 2021 11:38:26 GMT

Hello folks – I just published v1.0.0 of elm-book!

I’ll copy-paste a little sneak of the overview page here to explain a little bit more about the goals behind the project:

---

This library takes a lot of inspiration from two libraries:

• Storybook – a JS ecosystem tool that focus on showcasing components and their states, mostly aiming at internal design systems but also enabling the pattern of creating visual components in isolation.
• HexDocs – an Erlang/Elixir ecosystem tool that enables structured library documentation with guides, function docs, links to code and external sources.

Both of these tools affected their whole ecosystems greatly. Creating good docs is a common place when you’re in Elixir world. Using Storybook to facilitate design-engineering iteration is a common place in the JS world.What if the Elm ecosystem can create its own thing with the best of both worlds?

ElmBook aims to be just that – making it easy to create attractive documentation websites that can also work as a playground for live components built with Elm.

---

Please take a look, use it, throw punches at it and let me know how can we make it better!

The theme builder is a particularly fun little tool I made available as part of the website if you like messing around with theme colors.

I’d like to especially thanks @dillonkearns for the work on dillonkearns/elm-markdown since I piggybacked a lot on it to achieve the end results.

Write CLI scripts in Elm (IO Monad)

via Elm - Latest posts by @jwoLondon Jo Wood on Sun, 18 Jul 2021 10:52:23 GMT

I have been using Elm for teaching FP (and visualization) for a few years now, and use litvis for literate Elm without having to confuse students with TEA or html.

One thing I’ve missed though is the ability for direct file IO and it looks like elm-posix does exactly the job, so really helpful.

Write CLI scripts in Elm (IO Monad)

via Elm - Latest posts by @dimpase Dima Pasechnik on Sun, 18 Jul 2021 09:20:39 GMT

I think it’s a crucial missing feature of elm, absence of meaningful CLI. Imagine you teach a class using elm (well, I tried few months ago, it was not much fun, even though students had prior Haskell exposure, not the least due to absence of CLI, so the learning curve was too steep for many).

Liikennematto devlog #4: hello real-time traffic simulation

via Elm - Latest posts by @hasko Hasko on Sat, 17 Jul 2021 13:52:47 GMT

Thanks for the great write-up. I think it’s quite inspiring. You mention that you still experience gridlocks sometimes. In case you haven’t thought about it yet: Maybe restarting cars after a random wait time (with exponential falloff) would help resolve those. It’s a common technique to handle collisions.

Nicolas Hafner: Testing events - July Kandria Update

via Planet Lisp by on Sat, 03 Jul 2021 19:08:41 GMT

Another month filled with a lot of different stuff! We have a lot of conferences coming up, there was a bunch to do for marketing, the game has seen a lot of visual and gameplay tweaks, and we've started doing a lot of direct playtesting. Finally, the music has also made a lot of progress and the first few tracks are now done!

GDC, Gamescom, and GIC

Thanks to the very generous support from Prohelvetia we're part of the Swiss Games delegation to GDC, Gamescom, and GIC. GDC is coming up this month, and we have our own virtual booth set up for that. Given that both GDC and Gamescom are virtual this year, I honestly don't really know what to expect from them, it's going to be quite different. At least GIC is in person (Poznan, Poland) so I'm really looking forward to that!

So far we've invested quite a bit of time into looking at journalists to reach out to during GDC, and who knows, perhaps we'll also be contacted by publishers or something during the event. In any case, it's going to be an exciting week, for sure.

Gamescom/Devcom are coming up in August, right before the submission deadline for the Prohelvetia grant, so that's going to be a tight squeeze, too. September is gonna be a calmer month, as we've settled for a two weeks holiday for the team during that month. Then in October it's going to be GIC for a week.

Marketing

Also thanks to Prohelvetia we now have direct mentoring from Chris Zukowski with a monthly meeting for the next six months. His first advice was to focus a lot more on top of the funnel marketing (like imgur, reddit, festivals, influencers), and cut down on all the middle stuff we've been doing (like discord, mailing list, blogs, streams).

I actually quite like doing the weekly and monthly updates though, so I'm going to keep doing those. The Sunday streams have also proven quite productive for me, so I'll use them for that purpose too, rather than for any marketing intent. I am going to cut down drastically on Twitter though, as that does not seem to really bring us much of anything at all, and I'm going to stay away from Discord more in general (not just the Kandria one.).

After some brief experiments with imgur (and once even making it into most viral) I haven't returned to that yet though, as I've found it to be quite exhausting to figure out what to even post and how to post it.

We'll definitely have to try reaching out to influencers and journalists, but we're going to hold off on that until the september demo update is done, as a more polished demo should help a lot to make us look more presentable and respectable. We should also try out Reddit, but we haven't done the necessary research yet into how exactly to post on there without getting downvoted into oblivion.

The second advice Chris had for us was to do more....

Playtesting

We've started inviting people to do blind playtesting. The blind here meaning that they never played the game before, which gives us quite valuable insight into parts of the game that are confusing or annoying. We've done four sessions so far, and even with them being carried out over Discord, the feedback has been very useful.

I've also been inviting people for local playtesting, as being able to observe people in person is a lot better than doing it over the net. We haven't done any of that yet, but there's several appointments scheduled already. If you're near Zürich and would be up for a playtest session, please book a date!

And if you, like most, aren't close to Zürich, but would still like to help us out with testing, let me know anyway and we can arrange something over the net!

Tutorial

We finally finished a tutorial area for the game, giving it a proper starting point, and introducing people to the controls. It doesn't explain all of them in detail though, as I think we should instead keep the more intricate controls to challenges throughout the game, rather than trying to teach everything at once.

Designing the levels to teach the various control parts is going to be challenging, but I think ultimately it is going to be worth it, especially as it allows us to keep the tutorial in the beginning very short.

The only actual tutorial part still missing is a combat primer, for which we haven't worked out a good way of teaching it yet. I'm sure we'll find a way, though.

Tim

I took a holiday for part of this month, though otherwise it's been full steam ahead on the marketing research. I've added more reference games and potential contacts to our press & influencer document; while doing this I've taken into account the advice we got from Chris Zukowski, about not looking too closely at games with distinct differences to Kandria (e.g. Celeste has no combat; Dead Cells is a roguelike). I've also done more research on Steam short descriptions, and worked with Nick to redraft ours. It needs a few more edits, but it's nearly there.

I haven't totally forgotten the game though! With the new tutorial prologue in place, I added dialogue. This is now your first meeting with Catherine, after she reactivates you deep underground; but I've deliberately kept things short and sweet, as she guides you back up to the surface. The player has enough to think about at this stage without getting overwhelmed with dialogue; only once the tutorial segues into the settlement introduction from before, does the dialogue really begin.

Mikel

Mikel's been very busy and completed 6 different versions of the region 1 track:

• Medium Medium Vocal

• Quiet Quiet Vocal

• Ambient Ambient Vocal

Which the game can use to do vertical mixing:

Roadmap

Let's look at the roadmap from last month with the updates from this month:

• Build and add the tutorial sequence to the beginning of the game

• Finish the region 1 music tracks

• Add a fishing minigame

• Improve the UI for the game and editor

• Implement several editor improvements

• Compile data on journalists, influencers, and communities

• Implement a UI animation system

• Implement a cutscene system

• Polish the ProHelvetia submission material (partially done)

• Polish and revise the combat design (partially done)

• Implement a main menu, map, and other UI elements

• Reach out to journalists, streamers, and other communities

• Explore platforming items and mechanics

• Practise platforming level design

• Start work on the horizontal slice

The first three are scheduled to be done by September 1st, and so far it looks quite doable. The events are going to jumble things up a bit, but I hope that we still have enough time scheduled around to get it all done in time.

Until then be sure to check our mailing list for weekly updates, and the discord community for fan discussions!

Nicolas Hafner: Updates Galore - June Kandria Update

via Planet Lisp by on Sun, 06 Jun 2021 15:49:46 GMT

There's a lot of different news to talk about this month, so strap in!

The New Trailer

The most important thing to come out of this month is the new trailer! Check it out if you haven't yet:

I'm overall really happy with how it came together, and we all had a part in the end result. I'd also like to give a special commendation to Elissa Park who did the amazing voice over for the trailer. It was a pleasure to work together!

It's also been great to finally get some custom music by Mikel into an official part of the game. He's also been working on the first music tracks that'll be in the game, and I've been working on a music system to support horizontal mixing with the tracks. I'm very excited to get all that together into the game and see how it all feels! I hope that by next month's update we'll have a short preview of that for you.

0.1.1 Release

Meanwhile we also pushed out an update to the vertical slice release that makes use of the new linear quest system we put together. It should overall also be a lot more stable and includes many fixes for issues people reported to us. Thanks!

As always, if you want to have a look at the demo yourself, you can do so free of charge.

I think this will be the last patch we put out until September. I can't afford to backport fixes even if more bug reports come in, as the overhead of managing that is just too high. I can't just push out new versions that follow internal development either, as those are frequently in flight and have more regressions that we typically stamp out over time, but would in the meantime provide a more buggy experience.

We started working on fishing just recently!

Dev Streams

I'm heavily considering doing regular weekly development streams, both to see if we can attract some more interest for the project, and to be more open about the process in general. I feel like we're already very open about everything with our weekly updates, but having an immediate insight into how the game is made is another thing entirely. I think it would be really cool to show that side of development off more often!

In order to coordinate what time would suit the most people, please fill out this Doodle form. The exact dates don't matter, just watch for the day of the week and the time. Don't worry about the name it asks for either, it won't be public!

I'll probably close the poll in a weeks, so make sure to submit an answer soon if you're interested. Streams will happen both on https://twitch.tv/shinmera and https://youtube.com/shinmera, with both being reachable through the official stream page at https://stream.shinmera.com . See you there!

Palestinian Aid Bundle

Some good folks have put together a bundle on itch.io gathering money for Palestinian aid. I'm very happy to say that our game, Eternia: Pet Whisperer is a part of this bundle!

If you want to support this cause and get a huge collection of amazing games in the process, head on over to itch.io!

Tim

This month I had a varied mix of tasks: working on the script for the new trailer; updating the quests in the vertical slice demo to work closer to our original vision; researching press and influencer contacts as we plan more of Kandria's marketing.

The trailer came out great, and I'm really happy with the voice acting that Nick produced with Elissa Park. It was a great idea Nick had to use the character of Fi as the narrator here (originally we were going to use Catherine) - her serious outlook, and reflection on the events of the story, was just what we needed to fit the epic music from Mikel, and the epic gameplay and exploration that Nick captured on screen. The whole thing just screams epic.

The quests were vastly improved too. The first quest now uses Nick's new sequencing system, so that triggers fire automatically (and more robustly) when the player arrives at the correct location, and when combat encounters are completed. The logic is also much quicker to write, so linear quests will be much faster to produce in the future. The mushroom quest also had a big refactor; now you can organically collect mushrooms out in the world, rather than going to specific enabled points. You can even sell what you find to the trader, including those poisonous black knights. It really makes the world feel more interactive. There's been general tweaks to the other quests from playtesting, and I'll continue to refine them from my own playing and players' feedback up until the Pro Helvetia submission later in the year. I'm also planning to add a couple more sidequest diversions based on the new fishing (!) minigame being added at the moment; we think a combat-focused sidequest will work well too.

Finally on the marketing side, it's been rewarding to collect tons of potential press and influencer contacts we could approach in the future. I've basically been taking games that are strong influences and have similarities to Kandria - from hugely popular games like Celeste and Dead Cells, to lesser known ones like Kunai and Armed with Wings - then cataloguing key journalists and influencers who've streamed, made videos, or written about them. This will hopefully highlight some of the right people we can contact to help spread the word about the game.

Roadmap

Let's look at the roadmap from last month with the updates from this month:

• Make the combat more flashy

• Finish a new trailer

• Revise the quest system's handling of linear quest lines

• Design and outline the factions for the rest of the game

• Develop the soundscape for Kandria and start working on the tracks for region 1

• Add a music system that can do layering and timed transitions

• Build and add the tutorial sequence to the beginning of the game

• Finish the region 1 music tracks

• Reach out to journalists, streamers, and other communities

• Polish the ProHelvetia submission material

• Polish and revise the combat design

• Explore platforming items and mechanics

• Practise platforming level design

• Start work on the horizontal slice

As always there's some smaller tasks that aren't in the overall roadmap. We seem to be doing pretty well keeping on track with what needs done, which is really good! It's all too easy to misjudge the time required to complete things, especially in games.

In any case, time is flying fast, and there's a lot to do. In the meantime be sure to check our mailing list for weekly updates, and the discord community for fan discussions!