first little infight blog post

_posts/2024-12-11-Infight.md

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+---
+title: "A little fight on Discord"
+featured_image: /images/infightHeroImage.png
+tags: [games, programming]
+---
+So I made [a thing](https://infight.io)! I've wanted to build this game for over ten years.
+If you look through my [GitHub](https://github.com/ehippy), there're something like six discarded attempts since the early teens. 
+I was handed some free time over the last couple months, and found my way to picking up my most recent attempt and
+actually getting it up and online! Here're some thoughts on where it came from, what it is today, and where it might go.
+<!--more--> 
+
+## Tank Turn Tactics
+I was enamored by [this talk by Luke Muscat](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t9WMNuyjm4w&ab_channel=GDC2025) since I first saw it
+all those years ago. The *drama* that ensues in his office as this game took over 20 people's lives is such a fun story. They 
+eventually shut down game early as it had people betraying one another and plotting against each other. This explosiveness always 
+appealed to the little stinker in me. 
+
+<img src="/images/oldInfights.png"
+    style="float:right;width:200px;border-radius:20px;box-shadow: rgba(149, 157, 165, 0.4) 0px 8px 24px; margin-left: 20px;"
+    alt="Many old false starts at infight" />
+
+## Building Infight over the years
+
+My first version in I attempted in 2017 was attched to Slack, such that there'd be a channel at the office I worked at, and my coworkers and
+I could spend some idle-time plotting evil against one another. But the first time or two I attempted this I stalled out at actually 
+putting a grid on the screen and having players' avatars there to throw down. I started versions in C#, Python Chalice, Express-Dynamo, and then finally a fourth time a couple years ago on VueJS/Express/Postgres. It's a little trip down memory lane to see what I was thinking was the tools
+I'd want to use to make something like this happen online.
+
+I'm mixed on the stack that I picked up this time. This is my first outing with [Vue.js](https://vuejs.org/) and I must say I like it very much.
+It's lean and easy to use. There are lots of great plugins and it's fast and reactive.
+
+For persistence, I'd chosen Postgres with [Sequelize](https://sequelize.org/), and these have proven to be easy. However, I don't like that I'm having to pay a fair amount to run postgres at 99% idle. Starting anew, I'd do something that could scale gracefully to zero like DynamoDB.
+
+Likewise the Express JS environment has been familiar and easy enough, but something in Python would be more testable, less bug-prone. `Async/Await` is great, but I must have had a dozen instances of missing an `await` statement and having somewhat subtle bugs from that.
+
+## How it's going
+In spite of all that I really enjoyed spending a few weeks really leaning into making this little concept come to life. I've got a couple dozen players online now taking turns pummeling each other in the spare time.
+
+![An infight.io game board](/images/infightScreenshot.png)
+
+I'm struggling a bit with how I can get the game to spread into some other Discord servers. There's a steep tipping point: 
+ - Somebody in a discord server has to discover infight
+ - They need to convince their server admin to add infight to their server
+ - That person needs to do two authorizations: one for themselves and one for their server
+ - Then they need to do a couple of Discord commands to finish setting up the bot
+ - Then a handful of people need to opt in to play it. Then a game can begin.
+
+Once it's running it's pretty easy for players to drop in/out and get some shenanigans. 
+
+![Screenshot of discord with Infight interactions](/images/infightSlackShot.png)
+
+There've been a number of nailbiters and close calls. It's really quite the thing to see this little creation having such fun little interactions and laugh out loud moments.
+
+I also love how well it works on mobile! By leveraging a Discord channel to announce game updates, you get this awesome mobile experience where you can hop in and do some damage on the road.
+
+## What needs to change
+Tech costs aside, there are some gameplay patterns that I think should be addressed: 
+
+First is that Infight is currently designed to be always on, when one game is won, it immediately starts another. At the same time, the game's set up as a winner-take-all deathmatch where once you're dead, you likely remain dead for the duration. This means most players are dead for most of a day before a fresh game starts.
+
+Secondly, the original game is very simplistic on the board, relying on social dynamics to make it interesting. Online, alongside a discord, it doesn't hold enough interest to have slow day-long turns. There needs to be more to do, and less sitting-around-dead.
+
+So I want to take on an expanded game design that's more of a King-of-the-hill style scoring system where there's a designated scoring zone and a player needs to be alive in the zone at tick-time to get a point. Now, when the game ticks and hands out actions, it will sometimes spawn on healing heart. In this new world, I want a few hearts to drop and, crucially, a bunch of action-point clusters to allow for more stuff to be happening.
+
+Further, I think there should be two new player capabilities: walls and fires. Players should be able to spend an action point to drop a wall in a square making it impassible until its destroyed. Letting them spend an action to start a fire, which would occaisonally expand, make the board way more dynamic and challenging.
+
+## Will I sustain it
+I'm gonna stick with it. Aside from these gameplay improvements above, I really want to make it easier for users to discover it and get playing. If you've got some curiosity, you can join [the official Infight discord here](https://discord.gg/GJ9gbjFj). Or if you want to start a little fight of your own, add it to a discord you hang out in from [Infight.io](https://infight.io).