Hello everyone!
Sorry for the lack of updates over the last few days. I’ve reached a point that a lot of developers eventually hit where I have to admit: “just fast enough” is no longer fast enough.
As Portalborn has grown, it naturally takes more time to build, test, and verify changes. The biggest slowdown lately has been my automated Playwright test suite. Before I push builds live, those tests can take up to an hour and a half to complete, often in separate 20–30 minute chunks at multiple stages while I’m actively developing.
For anyone who isn’t a developer: Playwright lets me automate large parts of game testing. It checks different game states and confirms that systems are behaving the way they’re supposed to. In a game with both English and Chinese localization, even a relatively small feature or fix can require testing both language paths, so the test suite has grown alongside the game.
That testing is important. It helps catch problems before they reach you.
But it has also reached the point where my current PC has become a real bottleneck.
So I’ve decided to double down on Portalborn and dip into my savings for a new development PC with significantly more processing power.
That does not necessarily mean updates will suddenly come out twice as fast. What it should mean is that I spend less time staring at test runs and less time feeling pressured by long verification cycles. More importantly, it means I’ll be less likely to reach a point where I’m tempted to say, “This is probably good enough,” because testing another pass would take another half hour.
And yes, sometimes it may absolutely mean updates come faster too. :p
As I write this, the new Portalborn PC is still being set up. I haven’t even finished installing all of the game files, test suites, repository connections, development tools, and everything else yet, so I can’t give you real performance numbers just yet. The specifications look very promising, though, and I’m looking forward to seeing what the difference actually is.
Setup will probably take the rest of today, and I didn’t want to leave everyone wondering why things had suddenly gone quiet.
I mean… when have I really ever gone more than a couple of days without either an update or a post? :p
Thank you to everyone who has given Portalborn a chance, left suggestions, reported bugs, helped test things, or simply told me that you enjoy the game. It genuinely means a lot.
There are plenty more great things coming.