Project Canis: Dependency Management for Indie Game Devs

[Soatok]

If you're a game developer (whether independent or part of a AAA company), Project Canis will make your life a lot easier.

What is Project Canis? I fleshed out its motivation and design on Twitch (and noodled with my Twitch chat over what to name it). If you'd rather watch the video on demand:

Watch it here (starts at 3:20)

The Problem Today
Whether you're working with RPG Maker, Game Maker Studio, Visual Novel Maker, or your own game engine, if you find yourself using a third-party script or resource, you're forced to manually check for updates (and then manually update them all).

This can get a little bit unwieldy if you have 200+ third-party scripts that you're using in your game projects.

The lack of a salient package manager for indie game devs has created needless friction and barriers to collaboration that I intend to tackle. Even the indie game devs that help other game devs on Twitch and YouTube are more siloed away from their community than they should be.

Project Canis is my idea to solve these problems. I want to make it easier for game devs to collaborate. I want to make it easier for people who rely on third-party scripts for special effects in their game projects to be able to stay up-to-date with the latest bug fixes without conscious effort.

How Canis Will Work

There will be two components: Desktop software you install once and manage your project's dependencies with, and a server-side API that contains update metadata (and possibly the files themselves).

When an update is released by the third-party script developer, Canis will prompt you that there's an update available. (I might possibly also add an automatic update mechanism if it's deemed valuable enough.)

Updates will be signed with Ed25519, facilitated by my Dhole Cryptography library. All updates will be timestamped and committed to an append-only cryptographic ledger. This will make Canis toe-to-toe with the most secure code delivery mechanisms in the world with respect to supply-chain attacks.

Can I Help Somehow?

I'll be developing both projects on Github, and streaming my development on Twitch.

If you'd like to contribute code to the Github repositories, you're more than welcome to do so.

If you'd rather hang out on my Twitch streams, thank you!

But please don't feel at all obligated to do any of these things. I'm building this out of love, and because I believe it's sorely missing from the game dev community. You all do amazing without a tool like this, and I think this will only serve to help everyone.

 

[Kes]

[move]Useful Development Tools[/move]

 

[hiddenone]

@Soatok I've removed your ******* link, as we only allow Patreons for rpg maker games on this forum.

 

[Soatok]

[move]Useful Development Tools[/move]

Sorry, I didn't see this subforum when reviewing the index. I'll be sure to file things appropriately in the future.

@Soatok I've removed your ******* link, as we only allow Patreons for rpg maker games on this forum.

That's fine. But I'm curious: What is the purpose behind this rule in particular? It seems oddly narrow in its scope.

And since there's a separate forum for projects like this one, which are tools to help people collaborate on RPG Maker games, wouldn't it make sense to allow relevant ******* links too?

I feel like I'm missing some important context.

 

[hiddenone]

@Soatok This is the official RPG Maker forum, so the rules have to be tougher because the business is liable for a lot more than a fan forum would be. Instead of trying to monitor every ******* linked here that could cause issues, it was decided to limit them to only games that use the engines Degica sell.

 

[Soatok]

Okay, that makes sense to me. Thank you!

I'll probably begin working on this project on stream tomorrow evening. Hopefully I'll have something tangible that folks here can experiment with soon.