jahed.dev

Weekly Report: 3rd February 2020

FrontierNav

I've mostly been looking into which feature to focus on next and trying out various ideas.

Notebooks

Kind of like Wikis, Notebooks can help people complete specific goals like completing a quest or finding a set of collectibles. This would reduce the need to click around FrontierNav as Notebooks can embed entity data, maps and other visualisations in a single page for convenience.

There are some pitfalls I want to avoid with this feature. A lot of them related to the problems with Wikis. Duplication, inconsistencies, etc. However, I think it's best to get it started and see where it goes than assume the worst.

Discord Integration

Before implementing any integrations with Discord, I'll need to better display activity on FrontierNav. So when users take certain actions, like marking things as complete and adding new games, those are visible for others to see and engage with. Then, I can easily bring that data into Discord for convenience.

That's the main approach I'll be taking with third-party integrations. They shouldn't really replace any interfaces, as it compromises FrontierNav's activity, but instead provide convenient access to them.

Once that basic integration is done, I can look into more complicated integrations like quick search.

Other Features

While looking at the potential of the above two features, I couldn't help exploring other areas.

Completion and progress tracking could be greatly improved by provided clear 'achievements', either from the games or user-generated. This would allow users to clearly record what they start and complete. Combined with activity sharing, it would allow others to see what people are up to and what they've achieved.

A good way to let the community grow organically is to allow them to add any games to their library without having me police which games are supported. Progress tracking would complement this as you'd essentially have a hierarchy: To complete the game, complete these objectives.

Choosing One

I've been going on about giving FrontierNav a visible 'heartbeat' for a while so I'll be doing the Discord Integration next. Specifically the focus is on making user activity more visible on FrontierNav. Setting up a Discord Bot comes with additional financial cost, so I might not actually integrate it into Discord depending on how useful it ends up being.

GitHub Actions Problems

I spent more time than I wanted to dealing with failing test cases on GitHub Actions (their remote automation service). To keep it short: tests were only failing in GitHub's environment, I tried to figure out what was going wrong, eventually gave up, reverted everything, and the tests were passing again.

My development process wasn't blocked by any of this since, knowing these issues would come up, I'm able to run everything locally. But at the end of the day, it was a wild goose chase. I hope it doesn't become a regular thing.

Thanks for reading.