Freshly Squeezed Progress Report: A Finished Linux Port

Last week, I reported that I was close to finishing the creation of infrastructure to create a distributable Linux port of Toy Factory Fixer and other games I have made and will make.

I continued the work this past week.

Sprint 60: Ports

Planned and Complete:

• Create Linux port

My work was split up into the following tasks:

• T: Use bind mount to load current project and relevant Projects directories as read-only
• T: Build custom libraries for 32-bit
• T: Build custom libraries for 64-bit
• T: Build game using libraries for 32-bit
• T: Build game using libraries for 64-bit
• T: Update Cmake files to package up assets correctly
• T: Write script to coordinate all of the tasks to put together a finished binary with 64-bit and 32-bit support

Due to the Memorial Day weekend, I did not work on game development earlier in the week, and I put in fewer hours than I have in any week of the last month.

Still, I managed to finish the work, partly thanks to being able to leverage work I did many years ago the last time I tried to distribute a Linux version of a game.

I ended the previous sprint with the challenge that my C++ code was accidentally using C++11 features and so wasn’t compatible with older versions of gcc/g++.

I decided to change my code to not require C++11 compatibility, which required in one case creating an assignment operator to properly handle a member that was a reference, and in another case I learned that std::vector’s erase() can’t take a const_iterator. Luckily in that case I didn’t strictly need a const_iterator, but I found it surprising.

Anyway, once I had the game building in both 64-bit and 32-bit Docker containers using Debian Wheezy images (remember, I am using this older version of Debian to ensure that the game will run on as many varieties of Linux-based systems as possible), I then had to ensure that all of the game’s assets were packaged properly, which basically meant updating my CMake files to refer to my GameSpecific directories.

What’s nice about my Docker-based infrastructure was that I could switch up SDL2 versions very quickly. I just download the latest SDL2 tarball, put it in the appropriate directory, and then spin up my container, which will rebuild the libraries, build my game, and package it all together.

I can not only port Toy Factory Fixer to Linux-based systems, but I should be able to do similar work on Toytles: Leaf Raking. I want to play the game with an eye towards what the desktop might afford in case there are some features like keyboard shortcut support I might want to add.

But otherwise the porting work is done. Now I need to do the work of publishing it. I have vague plans to upload the game to itch.io, but I did not spend time on solidifying those plans last week like I wanted to, so I will be doing so this week, and next I will work on porting to Windows and Mac.

Thanks for reading!

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