Cricket Manager - Devlog Entry #3 Gaining Momentum
In the last devlog, I outlined what was in the works for Cricket Manager. Things have moved fast in the last 4 weeks as I have been working pretty much full time on the game.
Write Once to Throw away
The classic Unix philosophy of “Write once to throw away” is perfectly applicable in my case. With the initial codebase being a messy mass of code written pretty much in ad-hoc manner, it was the perfect opportunity to put to good use the good old unix philosophy. It also allowed me to focus on the pure technology side of things without bothering about the core logic as that I have already worked on previously.
Changing the tech stack
With the decision made to rewrite things from scratch, changing the tech stack was easy. Now with almost a year of experience I was better equipped to make decisions, rather than pick what looks easy in the first Iteration. The new tech stack comes with production grade chops at various big companies, so the capabilities of the stack was not in question, only question is in my abilities.
NextJS
The crux of the app is being built in NextJS which is a very capable framework and has seen great updates in the last one year, especially with the app router and the React Server Components. NextJS is a perfect fit for the app as it the serverless patterns are great for a read heavy app like this.
ShadCn UI
ShadCN UI has taken the world by storm in the past year, with its beautifully crafted UIs which are open source. Built on top of RadixUI which takes care of accessibility, these components were a game changer as it allows us to develop fast with a great UI that is ready to use.
Clerk
Authentication is a hard problem, and getting auth right is even harder. The clever folks at Clerk has managed to create a beautiful solution which is super simple to integrate and takes away a bunch of headaches. Moving to clerk has meant we are able to support Google Auth and Email with OTP in the first version of our app.
Turso
Sqlite is a brilliant technology. I have been using it to develop locally since the beginning, with the thought that eventually it will be migrated to Postgres/MySQL. And then came Turso, a company with the aim of taking SQLite to production. With a generous free tier, they are a lifesaver and now we are using them.
Vercel
Vercel the company behind NextJS has been doing some great work in the ecosystem and another one with a generous free tier. Their services make it simple to deploy and make changes quickly. Setting these things up manually takes a lot of time, and I am really happy to have made the decision to move to them.
So where are we now?
At this point of time, we are fairly close to the closed alpha release. The bot vs bot games have been running successfully since 23rd June, 2024 and revealed a few bugs which are being resolved. The UI is almost done, with a few tweaks here and there. The game engine is working well and the bots are able to play the game.
What’s next?
User teams and friendlies are next up in line. And the match engine needs to be updated to take user orders into account. Once that is done we would be ready to play user games. I am expecting to be able to run friendlies by mid July,2024 and user leagues by end of July, 2024.