Fundamentally, I just want to play FF Tactics against and alongside other people. The rest of this project exists to construct a framework in which other people experience the same desire, and possibly give me money for helping them do so.

This is part of my “Do One Thing” philosophy: understand the most basic abstract goal you’re setting out to achieve. In this case, it’s to reproduce the feeling of Final Fantasy Tactics‘ combat and some of its setting in a multiplayer, persistent way. All of the other theorizing and design must in some way contribute to this goal: it must either be part of creating the gameplay itself, or it must be part of encouraging other people to enjoy it, or it must be part of encouraging other people to pay for it.

The lovely people on the internet solved my cafe-finding problem for me, so today was the first day spent coding at The End. Not entirely coincidentally, today was spent getting some of the more useful client-facing services talking to the login system. I learned two new and important things:

1. Lattes make great breakfast.
2. A certain middleware vendor’s documentation tells vicious lies.

I’m fairly accustomed to third-party software being erratically documented and somewhat creative in its interpretation of specs, but this is a whole new level of incompetence. Not all is lost, thankfully, since I already had another approach running, but the feature I wanted to use would really have improved testability. As it is, in order to get the same level of test coverage and confidence I’ll end up writing about three times as much code.

Black cat not happy.

With that wonder out of the way, though, things went reasonably well. The prototype server I’ve been hacking at is now at least vaguely aware of whether or not the client has logged in and willing to shout mean things at clients that haven’t. All in all, a fairly productive day.