The experience of developing “Quak” during a hackathon.

In March 2019 we held a 2-day hackathon named “Ship IT!” in TouK. I was part of the team developing “Quak” – a 2D Liero/Soldat inspired game where players can immerse themselves into being a cute blob-like character while simultaneously laying waste to their opponent.

In this post I want to share our experience writing and designing the game, what kind of roles team members assumed and some of the technical choices we made.

Development

Working for a company that swims in JVM technologies – naturally we chose Kotlin as our development language. Our leader Rafał Golcz created a simple game engine in the ECS Model using the standard java game development library – libgdx and box2d for physics.

ECS stands for Entity Component System, and its main advantage over a standard object hierarchy (as games tend to be strongly object-oriented programs in principle) is its behavioural nature.

Instead of drowning in large inheritance trees and having potential “problems” with instantiation or making sure what kind of object goes where – we receive an elegant solution where the behaviour of every game object can be defined as a list of scripts that are attached to it. From design perspective it also allows for a more natural approach to creating specific objects (as in what properties an object has like dealing damage on impact, destruction on collision, bleeding).

Team Roles

Large gamedev companies (Blizzard, CD Project Red, Bethesda – to name a few) usually have strict roles for people working on their projects. Game directors, designers, writers, composers, testers, programmers, marketing teams, managers – all of which (except maybe for directors/managers) tend to be split between junior, senior and leads.

Developers are also often split according to their main responsibility: engine/tools development, gameplay programmers, special effect programmers. However, in smaller teams responsibilities tend to be way more relaxed. What I find really interesting is the natural emergence of similar structures during these 2 days of developing Quak.

We had a person responsible for art, another person for music and sound effects, 5 people who were actively developing various features for the game (controllers aka joystick and keyboard integration, weapons and missiles/bullets, collisions, character movement/controls, map loading, destructible terrain, blood splatter and camera shake effects).

At some point someone took the mantle of mapper and started creating the terrain you can see in the various screenshots in this article and a few others. What did wonders, in my opinion, was when one person became some sort of a Game Director and Designer’s hybrid. By making sure that everyone had a similar grasp of the direction the game was taking this person made sure that contradicting ideas and implementations didn’t emerge. I was this person.

Experience Itself

New features were “flowing in” as our leader noticed. Everything seemed to work seamlessly, every time someone wanted to push their changes to the repository they were met with the necessity of git pulling the changes which often introduced multiple new features. All of this added up made for a great passionate atmosphere, full of fast development and motivation. At some point we had outsourced testers from other projects to playtest early versions of the game as the sound of quacking echoed through the vast open-space of TouK.

Conclusions

During the project showcase Quak has been met with laughter and smirky remarks – great signs. We concluded that the game was a success – we delivered more than we thought we were capable of before the actual hackathon.

Making sure that the game is “juicy” (in gamedev slang – a game is juicy if love and care has been put into small details/finishing touches) at a relatively early stage with camera shake, visual effects like explosions or blood, sounds of duck quacking (as our bullets are all some kind of variation of TouK’s “duck” mascot) all made the game much more interesting to playtest and to develop – boosting the morale and work efficiency of the team.

Having little stand-ups every few hours to quickly discuss who is responsible for what and in which direction the game is going (what features to cut, which to implement, maybe some new ones?) as well as the aforementioned game director all made sure every member of the team knew what to do and in my opinion was the reason we managed to successfully finish the game. Quak has since then appeared at our stand during Scalar conference and was met with positive feedback.

It was an awesome experience but it wouldn’t be possible without a great team. Kudos to the entire Quak squad: Rafał Golcz, Robert Piwowarek, Agata Kłoss, Mateusz Mazur, Hubert Lipiński and Filip Majewski.

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Log4j and MDC in Grails

Log4j provides very useful feature: MDC - mapped diagnostic context. It can be used to store data in context of current thread. It may sound scary a bit but idea is simple.

My post is based on post http://burtbeckwith.com/blog/?p=521 from Burt Beckwith's excellent blog, it's definitely worth checking if you are interested in Grails.

Short background story...


Suppose we want to do logging our brand new shopping system and we want to have in each log customer's shopping basket number. And our system can be used at once by many users who can perform many transactions, actions like adding items and so on. How can we achieve that? Of course we can add basket number in every place where we do some logging but this task would be boring and error-prone. 

Instead of this we can use MDC to store variable with basket number in map. 

In fact MDC can be treated as map of custom values for current thread that can be used by logger. 


How to do that with Grails?


Using MDC with Grails is quite simple. All we need to do is to create our own custom filter which works for given urls and puts our data in MDC.

Filters in Grails are classes in directory grails-app/conf/* which names end with *Filters.groovy postfix. We can create this class manually or use Grails command: 
grails create-filters info.rnowak.App.Basket

In result class named BasketFilters will be created in grails-app/conf/info/rnowak/UberApp.

Initially filter class looks a little bit empty:
class BasketFilters {
def filters = {
all(controller:'*', action:'*') {
before = {

}
after = { Map model ->

}
afterView = { Exception e ->

}
}
}
}
All we need to do is fill empty closures, modify filter properties and put some data into MDC.

all is the general name of our filter, as class BasketFilters (plural!) can contain many various filters. You can name it whatever you want, for this post let assume it will be named basketFilter

Another thing is change of filter parameters. According to official documentation (link) we can customize our filter in many ways. You can specify controller to be filtered, its actions, filtered urls and so on. In our example you can stay with default option where filter is applied to every action of every controller. If you are interested in filtering only some urls, use uri parameter with expression describing desired urls to be filtered.

Three closures that are already defined in template have their function and they are started in these conditions:

  • before - as name says, it is executed before filtered action takes place
  • after - similarly, it is called after the action
  • afterView - called after rendering of the actions view
Ok, so now we know what are these mysterious methods and when they are called. But what can be done within them? In official Grails docs (link again) under section 7.6.3 there is a list of properties that are available to use in filter.

With that knowledge, we can proceed to implementing filter.

Putting something into MDC in filter


What we want to do is quite easy: we want to retrieve basket number from parameters and put it into MDC in our filter:
class BasketFilters {
def filters = {
basketFilter(controller:'*', action:'*') {
before = {
MDC.put("basketNumber", params.basketNumber ?: "")
}
after = { Map model ->
MDC.remove("basketNumber")
}
}
}
}

We retrieve basket number from Grails params map and then we put in map under specified key ("basketNumber" in this case), which will be later used in logger conversion pattern. It is important to remove custom value after processing of action to avoid leaks.

So we are putting something into MDC. But how make use of it in logs?


We can refer to custom data in MDC in conversion patter using syntax: %X{key}, where key is our key we used in filter to put data, like:
def conversionPattern = "%d{yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss} %-5p %t [%c{1}] %X{basketNumber} - %m%n"


And that's it :) We've put custom data in log4j MDC and successfully used it in logs to display interesting values.

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