diziet | Otter game server - now with uploadable game bundles (Reply)

In April I wrote about releasing Otter, which has been one of my main personal projects during the pandemic.

Uploadable game materials

Otter comes with playing cards and a chess set, and some ancillary bits and bobs. Until now, if you wanted to play with something else, the only way was to read some rather frightening build instructions to add your pieces to Otter itself, or to dump a complicated structure of extra files into the server install.

Now that I have released Otter 0.6.0, you can upload a zipfile to the server. The format of the zipfile is even documented!

Otter development - I still love Rust

Working on Otter has been great fun, partly because it has involved learning lots of new stuff, and partly because it's mosty written in Rust. I love Rust; one of my favourite aspects is the way it's possible to design a program so that most of your mistakes become compile errors. This means you spend more time dealing with compiler errors and less time peering at a debugger trying to figure out why it has gone wrong.

Future plans - help wanted!

So far, Otter has been mostly a one-person project. I would love to have some help. There are two main areas where I think improvement is very important:

I want it to be much easier to set up an Otter server yourself, for you and your friends. Currently there are complete build instructions, but nowadays these things can be automated. Ideally it would be possible to set up an instance by button pushing and the payment of a modest sum to a cloud hosting provider.
Right now, the only way to set up a game, manage the players in it, reset the gaming table, and so on, is using the otter command line tool. It's not so bad a tool, but having something pointy clicky would make the system much more accessible. But GUIs of this kind are a lot of work.

If you think you could help with these, and playing around with a game server sounds fun, do get in touch.

For now, next on my todo list is to provide a nicely cooked git-forge-style ssh transport facility, so that you don't need a shell account on the server but can run the otter command line client tool locally.