It's been a while since we last talked! A little over 3 years ago I published my last article, and now I feel warm and fuzzy as I type out these new letters.
Going forward, I'll focus on the journey of exploring new technologies and projects, rather than explaining how to use them in detail. The initial focus will be on video game development.
My previous articles have been more tutorial-style and I put in a lot of effort so that others can follow them. This has worked well when I had a lot of spare time during the pandemic, and when I could draw motivation from engaging with the serverless community, as well as see the visitor numbers go up.
Since then, I have rediscovered the joy and pain of not using AWS for everything, and had LLM crawlers scoop up and resell my content without permission. Rant incoming! I felt strongly disenfranchised with AWS when I tried to fix a bug in one of my hobby projects, which then required an upgrade of the serverless framework, because AWS didn't support the older node versions anymore, which also required an upgrade of a bunch of dependencies across multiple services and at that point I just gave up. I did not have the time and energy to keep this project alive, and decided to end a project that had been going on for 5 years and helped more than 3,000 people. The dream of "host in on AWS, it'll work there long-term" was over. The home-server I now use for my projects is currently in warranty because of course that hardware had to fail as well. But let's end this rant, and get to more enjoyable things.
Over the winter of 2024/2025 I dove deep into Factorio modding, where I had so much fun with unleashing my creativity with a new mod that focussed on transportation game mechanics. Imagine Transport Tycoon inside Factorio. The project was way too big in scope, but I managed to release a 1.0 version that some players enjoyed. It's been fun, but it's also nice to put this project aside. A surprisingly nice aspect was that I could end the project from my side without having to shut down servers, while people can still download and enjoy the experience.
Developing your own games is so much fun! Especially when you compare it with the "joys" of a day job, like surprise commitments, detective work in legacy code bases, office politics, and crunch work. All of those can happen in game studios, too. My focus here is on projects that I fully own and can use to counter-balance my day job.
One of those projects was a physical card game in a deck-builder style. You get resources, upgrade them, and help a medieval city to complete projects. The biggest joy was seeing family and friends who playtested it go from "aha, interesting concept" to "wohoo, I'm about to win this round!" Maybe I'll write about that in the future, too. But for now it sits on a shelf and is waiting to be picked up again for further improvements on the content.
Another project is a UI-based video game about mining asteroids, upgrading your ship, and repeating that loop until the end of the story missions. I've learned about the Godot engine, how programming with this engine differs from "traditional" software development, and how important it is to make mechanics easy to understand. It has been a lot of fun to look at other games, and combine their mechanics in new ways. Even more fun was to playtest with friends, seeing them enjoy playing the game and being glued to the screen.
Expect stories about how I explore ideas that are new to me, read about how I fail and succeed, and maybe get inspired to try something new for yourself.
I will not be running a mailing list, but you can subscribe to the RSS feed at https://bahr.dev/feed.xml. If you're looking for an RSS reader, I had a good experience with https://feeder.co/ over the last year.
See you soon!