Hey everyone! We live in an age where your digital footprint matters, SEO reigns supreme, and I have an unhealthy obsession over lasagne. With this in mind, I’m happy to announce that the official Tabletop Club website and forums are now live! 🥳 … and that I’ve decided to have lasagne for dinner tonight.

New Website

As you may already know from previous devlogs, I am currently knee-deep into re-writing the entire codebase for Tabletop Club for the first major update of the game, v0.2.0. And since I’m treating the update as a semi-reboot of sorts, I also wanted to take the opportunity to finally publish a full-on website for the game. So, after some blood, sweat, and tears, and maybe one or two ritual sacrifices, the website is actually, for-realsies, live for all to see!

It’s got all the cool things you expect from a website nowadays, like a fancy home page showing off what the game offers, a download page, a news page with all of the blogs that I’ve made, as well as a new community page with links to all of the official community channels! I think I’m also legally obliged to tell you that there’s now also a privacy policy, if that’s your favourite flavour of jam.

To be honest, I put off making a website for the game for a good while for one particular reason - I don’t entirely vibe with the state of front-end web development at the moment. At least, compared to when the internet really got going, there’s so many things to consider like different screen sizes, about a million different CSS stylesheets to choose from, and any number of “frameworks” to actually create the website… Luckily, after looking around for a while I ended up finding a framework that I actually kind of like - Jekyll. Unlike more complicated frameworks like Django or React which have all sorts of features and models, Jekyll goes back to the old days of just mostly writing your own HTML, but with a lot of tools to help you re-use certain sections of code, as well as neat in-built features for things like blogging (which is being used right now!). At the end of the day, it’s a static website generator with a bit of scripting, which is exactly what I was looking for!

If you’re interested in how the website is made, like everything else in the project, the code is available on GitHub. And as always, if you come across an issue with the website, please don’t hesitate to open an issue and let me know what’s wrong! If however, the issue is about the website’s security, then please email me instead, at drwhut@gmail.com.

New Forum

Since I decided that I was going to make a website for Tabletop Club, I also wanted to make a dedicated forum for it as well. There’s already an official Discord server, as well as an official open source Matrix server, but the main issue that kept bugging me was that these forums were not available on the open internet. That is, you have to have either a Discord or Matrix account to join, or specifically join as an anonymous user. Either way, Google’s web crawlers aren’t gonna be visiting either of these any time soon.

With this in mind, I wanted to get two birds with one stone: not only did I want to have a community forum that was accessible to the open public (that in turn, would be picked up by web crawlers and subsequently be shown on search engines), but I also wanted to have a place where anyone could download asset packs made by the community. Since I had already decided that a dedicated asset pack database was not going to happen for v0.2.0, my solution was (drum roll please)… The Tabletop Club Forum!

It uses the open source platform Discourse (slight side tangent, the documentation is awesome by the way, thanks guys!), and it’s been set up with a number of categories to start off with:

• Announcements, which is essentially just a copy of the website’s news, but you guys can reply!
• Asset Packs, where you can download and share your custom asset packs!
• Help, where you can get support for the game, whether it’s playing it, or importing custom assets.
• Forum Feedback, where you can share feedback… about the forum. This one’s pretty self-explanitory.
• General, for everything else!

If you think there should be more categories, feel free to let me know in Forum Feedback!

I also wanted to mention as well, this is my first time setting up a dedicated email for anything, ever. I’ve tested this new email with multiple methods, and I think I’ve set up everything correctly, but either way, if you try to create an account, and you do not receive a verification email, please let me know! Make sure to also check your spam folder as well, just in case.

Flatpak Update

A big part of the reason why I’ve gone through this whole setting-up-a-website stuff is actually because of the Flatpak version of the game! How are the two related, you may ask? Well, I’ll tell you!

Back in the olden days of last year, I knew I wanted to publish the game as a Flatpak so Linux users could very easily download the game from their distro’s software centre, and have it automatically update. But in order to do that, I needed to come up with an app ID that would uniquely identify my game amongst all the other cool apps on Flathub, like Blender and Inkscape! So at the time, I decided to go with io.itch.drwhut.TabletopClub, since I had published the game on my itch.io page. I could have also gone with io.github.drwhut.TabletopClub, since the source code for Tabletop Club is hosted on GitHub, and to be frank, I wish I went for the latter. Why? Because of verification.

One fateful day long after I had published the game to Flathub, I noticed something strange… a great big “Unverified” alert by the game! The mere presence of that alert shook me to my very core, and I was distraught… It was also a problem since new users would probably not be comfortable downloading the Flatpak anymore, and for good reason. So I set out on a mission to get my app verified - and crashed and burnt at the first hurdle.

In order to verify your app on Flathub, you need to put a file with a specific token on the website whose domain is represented in your app’s ID. So for the ID that I was using, io.itch.drwhut.TabletopClub, I needed to somehow create a text file under the drwhut.itch.io domain. The thing is, as you may have already figured out, I do not own the itch.io domain. So I can’t put the file there. Therefore, I can’t verify my app. Ever.

So, my only course of action was to rename the app ID. Luckily, Flathub have added a semi-easy way to do this, but it’s not 100% seamless from the user’s point of view. Just to really, absolutely, positively make sure that the app ID would never need to change again, I decided to make the new app ID net.tabletopclub.TabletopClub! Now, since I own the tabletopclub.net domain in its entirety, I can place the special file there and prove to Flathub that it is actually me publishing the app, meaning the app is now verified!

What does this mean for you guys? If you haven’t downloaded the Flatpak version of the game before, not much, except for the fact that the link to the Flathub page is now here.

However, if you currently have the io.itch.drwhut.TabletopClub Flatpak installed on your system, you will need to update it. Hopefully, your distro’s update manager should handle this automatically for you, but if you come across an issue updating the app, then you will probably need to run the flatpak command manually in the terminal:

flatpak update

It’ll say that io.itch.drwhut.TabletopClub has reached end-of-life (which is kind of a morbid way of putting it, to be honest…), and that it has been rebased to net.tabletopclub.TabletopClub. It’ll then ask for confirmation that you want to uninstall the old app and install the new one, enter “y” on this.

This process will convert the app on your system from the old, unverified version to the new, verified one. It should also carry over your old settings and notebook contents.

Future Plans

So with the website, forum, and verified Flatpak now published, what’s next on the agenda? As you can tell I’ve been in a server-side sort of mood lately, so after this announcement is posted, I’ll get back to re-writing the lobby server, which you can read a bit about in the last devlog that I posted!

After the new lobby server goes live, I’ll be back to working on the v0.2.0 update, in which I’ll be starting work on the brand new, way-more-intuitive objects menu! Once that is complete, as well as a couple of other revamps, I’ll be sure to write a devlog to update you all on the progress I’ve made, and to get your feedback on the changes.

In the long term, there’s a medium-sized elephant that I would like to address, which is GodotCon 2024! For those that don’t know, it’s the annual conference for the Godot Engine, which is the free and open source game engine that powers Tabletop Club, and this year it’s being held in Berlin, Germany in October.

Now, I don’t know about you, and I may be a little bit biased when I say this, but I personally think that Godot is an OK piece of software. I’m joking - it’s bloody amazing. And I know for a fact I’m not the only one that thinks this. So, to satiate my need to nerd out about Godot, game development, and open source software in general to others who also like those things, and as an excuse to exacuate England for a bit (if you know, you know…), I shall be attending GodotCon this year!

Because I’m attending this year, I really want to have at least something from the v0.2.0 re-write to show off on the show floor. I don’t usually do this, because I, like many other game developers, am absolutely rubbish at deciding deadlines and sticking to them, but I make this promise to you:

Before GodotCon starts on the 12th October, I shall try my absolute hardest to release, at the very least, one pre-release version of v0.2.0.

Now, I know enough about myself to know that there is a 100% chance that I will not be able to release v0.2.0 fully before GodotCon, that’s just an unrealistic expectation. However, I think I can get a functioning alpha or beta version of the update released before then - it probably won’t be feature complete, and it’ll have some bugs for sure, but that’s why I make pre-release versions of the game, so that you guys can test it and find the issues that I couldn’t.

It’ll also be a really good opportunity for you all to give your feedback on the re-write, and to let me know what you think of the new UI and controls. I’ve been working on this update since late last year, and I’m super proud of what I’ve done so far - so I’m absolutely determined to get it in a playable state, and I’m super excited for you guys to try it, hopefully, in October!

Donate

You knew this plug had to be somewhere in here, right? 😉

Although, I feel like I have a pretty good excuse for plugging my Ko-Fi here! Since I needed to purchase not only a domain, but also a virtual private server (VPS) as well as an email service for the forum, all of these things are coming at a new monthly cost for me.

So if you like the project, and you would like to help contribute towards the running costs of the new infrastructure, then please feel free to donate on my Ko-Fi page! Any donations, no matter how big or small, are hugely appreciated.

And with that, I bid you all adieu! If everything goes to plan, next time you hear from me, I’ll have some more things to show off from the v0.2.0 update!