August was a month for consolidating the work that came out of July. The most relevant achievement was the initial full release of my next portfolio project. Here is a quick summary.
Achievements
Released Sway The People! v1.0.0
This month I released the version 1.0.0 of Sway The People!, my most recent portfolio project. I also wrote a blog post about it.
Sway The People! is a political simulation game focusing on election campaigns. The player creates a candidate, set ups a party and agenda, and runs a 14-day long campaign against three other NPC candidates for the presidency of a fictional nation. The most interesting part of the gameplay is that most of the game is driven by LLMs: LLMs generate events to which the candidate has to respond, generate the questions and answers from the NPC candidates during debates, and decide the outcome of the player's choices.
Sway The People! is a more ambitious exploration of AI Engineering, the area I have been focusing on for the last couple of years. It was also the first significant personal project I did mostly using AI coding agents, a practice I have already been using at work for about one year now. More details can be found on the blog post linked above.
Started studying The Great ScrumMaster
In July I had finished studying Fundamentals Of Software Engineering, but had not chosen its successor. In August, I chose one and already started working on it.
The career studies book I am working on now is The Great ScrumMaster, by Zuzana Sochova. It is the second time I am reading it, with the first one being sometime around 2019-2020. This is the first time I am studying it in a more structured way, though. The book left a big impression on me the first time I read it, and guided most of my work as a Scrum Master in the 6+ years since then, so I am eager to refresh my memory of it and consolidate the ideas.
Plans for next month
Improvements on Sway The People!
My main plan for September is to expand Sway The People!, both with some new features and improvements, as well as by publishing it somewhere.
Up until now, I have mostly kept to GitHub when it comes to publishing my personal projects. I always use the "Releases" section to provide the executables for each version of the projects. Sway The People! also uses this channel, but since this is a more ambitious project, I am also willing to try publishing it on a more visible place. For now, I am inclined to use itch.io, but I might also look for other platforms in the future.
With regards to the improvements, I plan to enhance how nations are used in the game, mostly to enable more intentful customization and variation. I expect to do these changes during September, and then move on to the next project (I don't have anything to share about it now), leaving more improvements to Sway The People! for a future time.
