Busy Busy Busy... and Sick!

Okay, so we finished our first release candidate and sent it off to publishers and distributors. Wish us luck!

We made the mistake of deleting the beta files off the server, we had the mac one back up pretty quickly but I'm getting the windows one back now.

I haven't been able to work on the site as much as I was hoping, unfortunately. I got another job and have been really sick lately so I've had no time whatsoever. I really want to get some forums going so we can see if we can develop any sort of community which is what this game will do well with, I think. Plus it will help a ton once we start selling the game to have a place for support.

Can't wait till they release the IGF winners, I think the date is december 18th for student entrants... it's very exciting, I've tried search around google to see which games are getting their name out there and I've seen Electropy a few places. So spread the word, cause we appreciate it! :-D

speed improvements

Okay, so the website scores were quite slow. They are faster now! I started storing the high score along with the level so it doesn't have to do a query every time. The only disadvantage of this is it has to compare the high score with the current high score every time you submit. So now I ran through all the Noob and Tutorial levels to test it out. Unfortunately since all the older scores weren't submitted with the new update, they won't be listed(although they are listed in the actual scores for the level). Since I will be clearing the scores eventually, it really isn't a big deal.

Well, hope the site works faster for you, it still takes a second or two to load all the levels but it is a lot of data, and there won't be any problem with scaling because it is only dependent on the level count.

One Week

Alrighty... we have one week till we are locking content and building release candidate one. It's a lot of fun, and a lot of work, especialy while working and taking classes. I'm really greatful I get to work with such a great team we have. We got some cool music added to the game with the addition of a new member to our team and it sounds great!

The online profiles we got working, its really fun stuff. When we have the next beta out you will be able to log into the game with your teamphobic.net account, as well as create one from inside the game. I think we have a pretty neat authentication system set up and I have it running in some of the background sites you can't really see, but soon you'll be able to log in to Electropy.com.

I've been playing some of the IGF games when I have the time. I really liked the booger game, haha, Gesudenheit I think it is called and Mayham Intergalactic was a lot of fun. I'm pretty confident Electropy will be in the top 12, I only wish we had the online profiles in the build we sent to IGF. It needs a lot of internal testing right now just to protect us from 1337 h4x0rs, err, I mean script kiddies with nothing better to do, haha.

I had to make a pretty major change to the site. I was pumping all data access through a web service because the database is only accessable from localhost, which makes it very difficult for me to test/develop on so I made this web service. Well, it was good at first, but not secure, and a bit slow for real operations so I took it done and that messed up the account creation. I've fixed the account creation, but I'm angry it took me as long as it did for me to notice. I'm trying really hard to build a robust and scable backend system that we can keep for a long time, it's a great learning process and pretty freaking crazy. I'm a little rushed at times because we need a lot of functionality to have the Electropy Scores and Profiles set up, but now that its there I can expand and tweak up what I've been doing. The website is a lot slower than it should... I'm calling too many external functions and too many SQL queries for the high scores. The most important part was getting it to work.

Next I'm going to be working on some FORUMS. We really want EVERYTHING to be built in house by Team Phobic, so having our own forums is no exception. They should be a lot of fun to write, and these will be the third forums I have written, and third time is the charm, right? My whole DB system is WAYYY different than anything I've ever made before, I got a lot of ideas from Microsoft CRM simply because thats what I have to use at work... and it has soooo many problems! I took the ideas and concepts I liked out of what they did and expanded and generalized it to what I wanted to do, and removed the problmes :-D Something I call "Impresario". I'll get around to posting more about how it works later.

Well, it's late... thanks for reading, go play some Electropy!