I expect to return to working on galaxy soon, but in the meantime, I've still been making some small changes. I wouldn't consider any of them noteworthy on their own, but for transparency, here's everything that's been going on behind the scenes!
Changed username system
Previously, usernames were case-sensitive. For example, there could be both a george and a George. Of course, this... isn't really ideal, so I changed them to be case-insensitive. If george already exists, you can no longer sign up as George.
Some people had usernames that conflicted with this new system, so if your account was newer than the other person's, I've slightly changed your username and sent you an email from support { at } galaxy [dot] click asking you if you'd prefer something else.
Quality control
When the site was first launched, the only criteria for game verification was that you submitted a game¹. Having been in the position of rookie gamedevs before, I wanted to foster an environment where developers could learn and grow. However, people realized that they could submit intentionally bad games, and I'd feel obligated to accept them because, well, I didn't want to reject them. As a developer, it feels incredibly invalidating to be rejected, or for your work to be described as "not good enough". But at the same time, I didn't want galaxy to be known as the site where all the horseshit resided, or have to spend way too many hours of my life turning a submission form into a "yhvr gives you constructive criticism" box.
Slowly, I gravitated towards rejecting games that I deemed to be "not good enough" (the bar still wasn't super high). But still, every time I said "no" it hurt. I couldn't help but feel the pain of rejection every time I turned down a game, no matter how bad it was. It felt like a big burden being the only staff member who pulled the trigger on rejecting bad games. I should've expected this, being the owner of the site and all, but somehow I didn't. I suppose I was too shortsighted during the development phase.
To make verification more consistent between staff members, and to reduce the burden on me, I changed the way that staff (4 people initially) verify games. Instead of immediately deciding, people would vote on if the game should be verified or not, like a council. The first option that 2 different people picked (accept/reject/request changes) would decide the fate of the game.
However, I still wasn't too pleased about just two people holding this much power. I didn't want to raise the number to 3 or 4, because the staff team is a mess of timezones and game verification times becoming 24 hours or longer doesn't seem ideal. So, I decided to bring another staff member on, so I could feel comfortable bumping the vote requirement to 3 people. The current list of staff members is me (yhvr), thepaperpilot, ducdat0507, yahtzee, and now also Piterpicher².
Now, whenever you submit a game of yours, at least 3 staff members will vote to decide if it belongs on galaxy. I still don't want the verification process to be viewed as daunting, scary, or overly picky though. Unless it's your first/second time ever writing computer code, your game will likely be accepted. And if it gets rejected, spend some time honing your craft and you'll be surprised how much you can improve. Trust me, I used to be where you are. (Although Scratch games may still be accepted, they will be held to the same standards as HTML5 games, if not slightly higher due to a bias against Scratch.)
RSS/Atom game update feeds
If you click "view all updates" under a game's most recent update log, the page listing all updates now lets you subscribe to that game via RSS and Atom. If you're a little old school and still use a feed reader, this might be right up your alley! (huge thanks to wackbyte for adding this feature)
Server upgrade/reduced(?) downtime
I've upgraded the cloud server that galaxy is hosted on from 2gb RAM/2 vCores --> 4gb RAM/3 vCores. The main reason for this is because when I would re-build the website ([open source btw](https://gitlab.com/yhvr/galaxy-astro)), it would fail because the server ran out of memory³. It wasn't close to running out of CPU power, but now the current specs should keep galaxy running smoothly unless the site approx. quadruples in active user count, which I doubt will happen in the foreseeable future.
I've also slightly changed the way that the site is updated, so while you may notice slight performance degradation, the site will no longer go down for a minute or longer when everything is being re-compiled. Hopefully this means I can achieve true 24/7 uptime, or at least get much much closer. Either way, it's still an improvement that should lead to me dealing with less "ohshit why is the site still down" moments.
galaxy on Matrix
If you're as tired of Discord as I am, I've made a Matrix space for galaxy. You can check it out at [#galaxy:glxy.chat](https://matrix.to/#/#galaxy:glxy.chat). It's pretty lackluster at the moment, but I'm just trying to gauge interest. If people love it, I'll add more channels, or maybe make a separate space for my non-galaxy projects. It's also bridged to the Discord server, so you can see messages that people send from there, and vice versa.
If you don't know what this means you can safely disregard this.
I really needed a break, and I'm super grateful that I was able to get one. Thank you all so much for sticking with the site despite the lack of new updates/bugfixes. I've started school and I'm now juggling other projects, college apps, and an internship so I won't be able to work on galaxy obsessively like I used to over the Summer. If you know how to code in TypeScript/Svelte and have some time to burn, consider stopping by the GitLab repo (linked above) or hopping into #galaxy-dev on matrix or Discord. Contributions are always welcome :)
If you have any questions, feel free to ask them in this thread, in the Discord server, or in the not-so-new Matrix space, and I'll be more than happy to answer. Thanks for taking the time to read this hideously long wall of text :D
¹ Another criteria was listed as your game having to include some proof that your galaxy account was tied to it (ie, linking to it in the credits). However, nobody followed this rule, and it was eventually scrapped because it was a very high bar to entry. The announcement flows better by saying that you had to "just submit a game", but I don't want to be accused of lying/retconning, so I thought I'd add this little detail.
² I chose Piter mostly because he's written a ton about incrementals--specifically TMT--at https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/UsefulNotes/TheModdingTree. I've slowly been growing tired of TMT games, and I hope that his, uh, passion? (no negative connotation) can offset my slight weariness of TMT.
³ Technically I could have ran the builds on my local machine and uploaded them to the server, but that doesn't feel like a great setup. I'd much rather be able to build the site directly on the box that it's going to be ran on
