Development Update – Cycle 2 – March 2022

Hello there & welcome to the Development Update for Galaxsi Studios for Cycle 3! Not going to be a long one but there is a development update stream in accommodation to this so I am looking forward to this one this time as I haven’t done it in a while. Last time, I was a little flustered so hopefully this time I won’t be haha! In this update, I have a lot to cover in relation to Galaxsi Bot (both API & UI) as that has been my primary focus for the last month.

For those who are reading for the first time, a development update is where I go through the completed tasks I have worked on in the last 4 weeks. A Cycle refers to those 4 weeks and each week focuses on an aspect of myself that I want to grow. These development updates are for me to keep track of myself as well as show you what I am working on. Think of it as someone giving you a life update but for me, its a look back at how I’ve grown in the last month.

Each week is a “Sprint” where I focus on one project for the week. Week 1 focuses on Galaxsi Studios, Week 2 focus on Galaxsi Bot, Week 3 focus on Matgalaxsi & Week 4 is interchangeable between Galaxsi Bot & Matgalaxsi or any other projects I work on. Each “Sprint” is split up into 4 parts, a planning stage which is me planning out what I need to do for the sprint, my action stage which is where I do the bulk of the work, review stage where I go ahead and look at what I did and make sure its correct and to the way I like it and a release stage which is where I release it. This way, I am able to get a good grip of the work and deliver quality.

Announcements

Before we start, there are 2 announcements I would like to make in relation to Matgalaxsi & the developer update for next month.

On the Matgalaxsi Twitch Channel, we are performing a Charity Month where we will be doing a lot of things in relation to Galaxsi Studios such as gaming, creating a game and working on cool software stuff. Check out Matgalaxsi Youtube Channel for more information.

In relation to this, there will be no developer update in the month of June due to this event going on. We will be returning on Tuesday 5th July.

Cycle 3 – Introductions

So I am really excited to show what I have been up to these past few weeks. I have been working really hard on gettings ready for the Charity month as well as doing a lot of planning. In addition, I also worked on getting the twitch tools I need in order to run the stream a bit more smoothly. This update is going to be on the big side but I am quite alright with that as in terms of all cycles so far, this has been one of the most productive cycles I have ever completed.

Website Update

There was only 1 update in relation to the website and that is the Galaxsi Bot landing page has been updated to contain more information about the project itself. I wanted to go into more details about what exactly it can do and how it is helpful.

You can check out the new landing page for Galaxsi Bot at this link: HERE!

Galaxsi Bot Updates

So there are 2 parts to this main update for Galaxsi Bot, There is the updates that take place on the API Side which is the service that runs the actual Galaxsi Bot Service & the UI Updates which makes it easier to interact with that service. The UI is built within Angular which offers easier code creation and easier ways of creating this interface. I have made major updates in terms of the gears at the back and how things work.

Galaxsi Bot API Updates

This time around, I was able to fix up a lot of the bugs that were sitting in the code. In the developer update, I only touched on them but here, I would like to go into a bit more detail.

• Online Scan was not scanning properly
• There were some instances where the messages for hosting/hellos were not being cleared after the stream had ended.

On top of that, I actually took time to reconstruct the team mode that Galaxsi Bot had built before. This time, I made it all on the database side which is where the team is decided. At the moment, the team with the least number of users will have new team members assigned to those and if both of them pop up, then it is random. In addition, I have created new commands that tell which team is leading, which people are in which team and the ability to manually reassign teams. In addition, we only went 2 teams this time and not 4 because 2 teams seems a bit less chaotic than last time.

I also want to take a moment and talk about the fact that the new game mode has been finalised and is ready for development. I won’t be starting development until July but the plan is there and a testing method is also planned and I cannot wait to share it. I have talked with my moderation team team about and they seem very on board with the idea. This game will be less random chance than the draw command and will have a bit more skill towards it. I will be announcing the concept of the new game in the July Development Update.

Galaxsi Bot UI Updates

I have so much that I want to share with you in relation to this. There has been so much progress in terms of what this system can do! Prepare yourself for a long read as this will be going through a lot.

The first interface I created was a basic interface where I was able to create a userlist where I am able to see the user list including the scores that each user has. This way I am able to see who Galaxsi Bot has registered to their system. At the moment, it’s just for viewing but eventually the plan will be to create an interactive ui that allows me to toggle settings on each user or modify their scores easily. In team mode, it will show the user’s team as well.

The next interface I would like to show off is the light interface. This is an interface to connect my lights to. For those who are kind of wondering, yes I could set this up on my stream deck, I could but there are limits to what my stream deck can do. With what I have built with this interface is something that allows a bit more control with the lights. Currently this control doesn’t offer much as most of the functionality was completed from behind the scenes. I also was able to setup some of the profiles which also has a bit more control from the code itself. This will be expanded on in the future when I want something to happen with my lights.

One of the more “intuitive” tools that I created this month was my raid searcher tool. This is a tool that grabs all the channels that I follow and streams that are playing the same game as me and crunches it through a set of rules. If the channel is around my average viewer count and they are either being followed or playing the same game as me, then they will go into the recommended streams. This allows me to find quickly the ideal streamer to raid after my stream is finished. I plan to integrate a raid from this console option but currently, I am finding it difficult to actually do the raids, I’ve been debating on how I can do it and I think I’ve got some ideas. I’ll share more about this tool when I work on it more.

OBS Integration

One of the last things I want to share in relation to the Galaxsi Bot UI, I want to show you some of the interfaces/overlays that I worked on. This part will include interfaces that I worked on that can be used in the browser dock windows that is integrated with OBS or browser sources on the actual stream overlay. Most of these are self explanatory and you figure out what exactly they do.

One of the overlays I will talk about is the top bar that you might have seen on top of my streams. This bar is the main overlay of my channel. I plan to work to allow different types of bars. I plan to work on this further and even expand on it before the charity month. At the moment, it displays basic information about the channel, any follower goals I have currently running for the channel and the top 5 scorers of Galaxsi Bot. I have built this in a way so I can sub in different bars when I need to and only update when they are required. This also offers a basic outline of how I can do other overlays that I plan to do in the future such as prediction and polls.

That is all for the UI Updates, I am very happy with how they have been coming along and I am excited to expand on these in the future! Look forward to more updates.

Matgalaxsi

I was able to release 2 new videos in relation to the channel. I am not counting the video that I did two days ago when writing this part of the blog post as I felt like that was more of an informal video than anything.

The first one I released was the first Q&A Video of the channel. In this video, I went through multiple questions submitted by users. For this, I actually developed a Q&A Viewer which I used on the video itself so there was some form of organization within the video itself. This video is the longest Youtube Original which I am proud of. I am also getting used to the video editor really well now and I am learning more as I go. I do want to kind of learn some more tips and tricks to help with editing so I plan to do a course to hone more skills after the charity month so that we can develop videos a bit more easily.

In addition, I also worked and released the charity video. This video was a lot more professional (technically speaking) and I attempted to make a formal video creation process. This included writing a script, getting it reviewed, making adjustments, filming, editing, reviewing and releasing. I was pretty happy with the final product and I think I was able to get my message across easily. I want to give a shoutout to my friend Courtney who took time out of her busy schedule to review my script. In the video, I went through multiple different aspects of the charity month, our goals and events that we will be doing. I learnt a fair bit in terms of the video making process for Youtube and I even did a quick short for it.

Cycle 4

That is all the updates for this month, now here is a quick preview of what is coming up in Cycle 4! Note, that I am going to be working on getting ready for the Charity Month coming up next month so my update will be mostly related to those.

Matgalaxsi

• I’ve been working on team name reveal videos. The logos for each team have been finished and now I am taking time to do the video reveals for the teams.
• I’ll also be taking time to work on some of the promotional material to be used for the month such as team updates, stream schedule background, going live text, etc.

Galaxsi Bot

• Working on the 2 new cards to be spawned for team mode
• Working on polishing the system
• Working on new commands
• Creating the overlay bar for the charity stream which will link to the fundraising page

That is all for this development update, thank you so much for reading and I cannot wait to talk again in July!

~Matt