The Dugout · Devlog

An engineering diary — challenges, wins, and paths not taken.

Week notes: Free Agent 15 from Saudi Arabia

weekly world, onboarding, transfers

Before rewriting the queue worker in Go, I'd discovered that when new players (free agents) were added to the game world (to replace retired players), the names of the players were generated procedurally (think: Free AgentN). Obviously, I wouldn't stand for that and I made the processor that handled that task in NestJS reuse the name generation solution that we use for seeding new leagues and countries.

However, after switching to Go, the name generation technique wasn't re-implemented in Go and I only found out by chance. I was going through the list of free agents in the game and decided to jump to page 15 and there I saw Free Agent 15 from Saudi Arabia.

I'd also sent my brother a link to tryout the game to get his initial thoughts - even though he prefers games like FIFA - and he mentioned that the team badges seemed generic, which I agreed was the case and I'd only been postponing addressing that cosmetic bit until the more important parts of the game world were settled. Well, we'd reached that bridge and we needed to cross it.

One other bit of feedback my ONE tester gave me was that the onboarding tours were useful but scanty and didn't cover the multiple screens the game had grown to have. I added the onboarding tour a couple of months back but I'd consciously decided to skip extending the coverage because I thought they could be better and well, this was the week to make good on that promise.

And so we had the tasks for the week:

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