Status of the Project @2023-05-24

Greetings everyone.

On May 13th this project hit its fourth birthday. In these four years it has seen a growth that I would have never imagined and with such growth come more challenges and a tiny bit of anxiety.

Content

There hasn't been much when it comes to new content: I haven't been studying anything new that could be explained in this book, mostly due to real-life concerns and events.

There has been the occasional fix and refinement, but nothing major. I definitely apologize for that, but I also came to the realization that the more content I add, the less content I'll be able to add on my own, so a "plateauing" of sorts is expected.

Accessibility

This book's main goal has always been "making game development accessible", and such goal was reached when it comes to "money": the book is free and I tried to pack it with as much material as possible.

There have been a few things bothering me though.

First of all, I'm starting to think that the language in the book has deviated from its original purpose and landing straight into almost college-grade formal explanations which may not give a "basic understanding" before delving into the formal details of a subject. In short: I think the book may have become "hard to understand".

Second, the book makes heavy use of images to explain concepts and such images may not always be the most "accessible": sometimes they feature red-blue tones which may be hard to distinguish for people who suffer from colorblindness, but that's not the only issue.

The huge quantity of images cannot be properly conveyed to people who suffer from any kind of visual impairment (not necessarily blindness, it could also include poor eyesight) without a "long description". Same goes for formulas, which (in the EPUB versions) are converted to images and don't really have a description.

The first issue can be solved relatively easily by changing the color inside the affected images, but the second issue is a lot harder.

I have been thinking how I could code a Pandoc filter to be able to gather all descriptions (put in a "longdesc" attribute inside the markdown text) and then dump the descriptions (along with the image references) inside an appendix. There should be a link from the image to the description, and another from the description inside the appendix back to the image.

That doesn't mean I managed to code anything of sorts, in fact I have no idea how I could write such a thing. I don't know how deeply enough how Pandoc works to be able to even know if such a filter is even possible.

"Earthquake relief bundle for Türkiye and Syria" mini post-mortem

At the beginning of April I decided to try and see if this book would be accepted for the "Earthquake relief bundle for Türkiye and Syria", in the hopes of bringing something of value for a noble cause.

I have to say that the following month has been really hard on my nerves, I was torn between "I think it's a good work" and "I'm so not sure about whether this book is good enough. I'm scared it will be thrown out as a malicious submission or something" (kindly brought to you by Anxiety™).

There is no need to state how ecstatic I was when I found out the book was accepted, and I was floored when I saw how much attention such bundle brought to this product.

I really hope that my, albeit tiny, contribution helped the bundle raise more money for charity.

Conclusion

The book is on the verge of 10 thousand downloads (which will be promptly celebrated by changing the little "#k+ downloads" image on the itch page) and I cannot overstate how thankful I am for all the people who took the time to download, read and rate the book.

And as always, thank you everyone for reading my long long rants.

Take care everyone.

Penaz