Not the valve one.

After playing spacetraders a few months ago, I've once again found myself playing an API game. In Artifacts, you're automating characters in an mmorpg.

Last time around I wrote everything in JS to go fast, but wished I'd tried out something new. This time around, I went with Rust.

I haven't used any languages with memory management since C/C++ at university, so actually thinking about the stack and heap and reference counting and all that was an interesting change of pace.

For some definition of interesting. Was that a &str or a String that I wanted?

Read the book.

I don't remember what blog I found it on, but a few days into using Rust, I read a comment like "you can't just jump into using Rust, you have to read the book". Whoops, I guess.

Personas.

My implementation for artifacts is pretty similar to what I'd done for spacetraders with personas I could attach to my characters, but just a different set of tasks. Usually characters stuck to a specific persona, but sometimes I would have them all do the same one overnight (e.g. to get a bunch of resources or level up). The ones I ended up settling on were:

The Crafter persona to make weapons, gear, or jewelry.

The Gatherer persona to chop wood and mine ore.

The Fighter persona for characters to farm individual monsters or tasks coins.

The Angler persona to fish and cook.

At one point I also had a Chicken Chaser that just battled chickens.

Rust positives.

As a fan of Optional introduced recently in Java 8 (okay so I guess 2014 isn't considered recent anymore, but at least that isn't as old as that chicken chaser reference (Fable came out in 2004) and I did have a coworker whose license plate was JAVA 8, but that's unrelated) as a way of making code more explicit and readable, Rust's Option is pretty handy as well. Result is handy for similar reasons.

Spinning up and coordinating multiple threads was super painless. If something went wrong with one of them during the night, the other characters could still do their thing.

loop {} is rad.

Grabbing code from other crates was relatively straightforward. I used chrono (for dealing with time stuff), reqwest (for making the API calls), and serde (for handling json).

Error messages during compilation are excellent. No notes. For someone totally new to the language, they provided great starting points for learning more.

Skies.

My five characters are named after protagonists from Skies of Arcadia, the best RPG ever made (when wearing my particular set of nostalgia goggles): Vyse, Aika, Fina, Enrique, and Drachma.

It is surprising that in ~2 years of doing this blog I haven't written anything about that game yet. Guess I have to replay it in 2025.