We shipped a number of quality-of-life and performance improvements to make Athena Crisis more fun and faster than ever! Development of Athena Crisis is currently focused on 3 major area: Quality-of-Life, Performance and Mobile:

Quality-of-Life

There were two major quality-of-life improvements in the past month: Undo Actions: Up until recently Athena Crisis only allowed undoing the whole turn. This worked well, and gave each action especially late into a turn a lot of meaning, but it was occasionally frustrating when moving a unit to the wrong field, especially on small screens. In addition to undoing a turn, you can now undo every action up until the beginning of your turn. Undo was also added to the Map Editor and the demo at athenacrisis.com. If you are interested in how it works, check out the code here.
Custom Movement Paths on Mobile: In fog you might want to avoid certain fields if you know an opponent is there. On Desktop, you can use your cursor to draw a path for a unit to follow. On Mobile, however, this doesnt work. Moving a finger across the screen initiates panning/scrolling instead. Mobile browsers also give little control for gestures or disabling scrolling. Nevertheless, I wanted the UX for this to feel as natural as possible. The map now locks in when using a finger to move across the blue movement radius, but you can still pan the map outside of a unit's movement radius. Instead of adding a new type of interaction, this smoothly integrates with how movement already works. While just a few lines of code, it took half a day to put together to get the interactions to feel just right and make them work properly on mobile: disable scrolling, handle every input device at the same time, select the field when lifting a finger but only after drawing a custom path, and more. It made me appreciate the amount of micro-interactions and states that exist for each field (see Mask.tsx).
It felt incredibly rewarding to ship these features. Undo and touch interactions are so challenging to get right, but as you can see in the above code that is running in production right now their implementations are quite elegant.

Performance

We didnt invest in performance monitoring and development moved incredibly fast in the past six months. Together, those two things always result in the same issue: performance will regress. Recently Athena Crisis has been a bit sluggish, and draining battery. We deployed major performance improvements this week which will keep your devices cool, batteries lasting long, and frame-rate up and to the right. Athena Crisis is now faster than ever.

Mobile

The iOS App is mostly complete and was approved by Apple, and the Android App is just missing a few things related to In-App-Purchases. Keep an eye out for the release date! In addition to the above we updated the Desktop clients, fixed bugs, improved balancing and focused on upgrading to all the most modern tech to ensure Athena Crisis can keep shipping and moving fast. Athena Crisis is finally starting to feel complete, and today is the best day to try it!

[ 2025-01-24 14:38:39 CET ] [ Original post ]