Polis

Polis is a team-based, real-time strategy game set in the world of mythological Ancient Greece.

I picked up Polis v3 development on an advanced stage, almost ready to launch, after a reduction of forces on the company. I collaborated closely with David, our game designer who also covered artwork, to finish the new version of the game.

Performance and Stability

• Fixed game initialization issues.
  • Top-level promises made the game client attempt to connect to the server before loading all the assets. If the asset loading took too long, the server connection would be dropped due to heartbeat settings, leaving the client in a corrupted state.
• Fixed source map support for better observability on the client monitoring service (Sentry).
• Enabled CDN to reduce bandwidth usage and improve loading times.
• Cleaned up ticks and event listeners.
• Optimized server-side buildable tiles computation.
  • This fixed a critical performance issue in late-stage games. K8s pod CPU usage would max out after a certain number of buildings in the map because the computation was running every tick.
  • Fixed using a dirty flag; only execute the computation after the map changes.
  • The system had been recently ported to the server side, so the team probably didn't have time to finish the implementation.

Observability

• Added verbose networking logs to identify connection issues on the platform.
• Added request origin IP logs to compare with AWS Load Balancer requests.

Gameplay

• Added early victory and tweaked victory conditions.
• Implemented server-side validation for building limit tags.
• Implemented God bonuses using the game's prop system.

UI

• Enabled detailed tooltips in the recipe book.
• Implemented team bonuses HUD.

Miscellaneous

• QOL improvements for observers:
  • Show focused village's resource HUD.
  • Added an outline to player's cursor to contrast with the map.