Devlog #1: Building more foundations

I hope everyone had a beautiful Saturday. I’ve had a busy day, filled with a few frustrations throughout today.

Yesterday I started trying to lay the groundwork for event handling inspired by Elm, which has in-turn inspired frameworks I’ve enjoyed using in the past few years. Unfortunately, I’m still new enough to Rust that I could not figure out how to solve a few issues. It would get incredibly technical if I tried to dive in, so instead, I’ll link this post which I found browsing on Reddit while relaxing, but it seems to cover what I was running into earlier today.

Because of the time constraints of a game jam, I stashed my last attempt at that code around noon today and worked in earnest to get mouse events routed in a more traditional system. These mouse events allowed me to get the credits on my main menu clickable, and more importantly, gave me what I needed to add a “Log In” button.

For the remainder of the afternoon, I implemented a basic WebSocket server/client API. I then set my sights on setting up OAuth with itch.io – the goal is that you will be able to download the game on itch.io and be able to log in and play by using your itch.io account. My setback here is that I had never encountered the Implicit Flow. Because my webserver is not written in Javascript, I was mistaken in assuming that I could just implement it using the authorization code flow I had always used before. This assumption led to me wasting my own time. Eventually, when I discovered the issue, it just meant I had to prioritize setting up Tera for HTML templates and get a basic web page up to forward the token to the backend server.

The good news is that as of tonight, I have all of that flow working, and I’m currently just working on setting up the authorization flow between the client and server.

Tomorrow should go pretty smoothly, finishing that up. We’re also going to have a voice call tomorrow to discuss the vision of the game mechanics and environments as we’ve both been excitedly brainstorming today. I’m hoping to have some more visuals to show off with tomorrow’s update.