So, the few of you that read my blog may be wondering why I haven't posted in almost a month. Well, it's a valid question, but fortunately I have a fairly good excuse. It all started with my vacation from July 10th to July 20th. It was the first time in years that I had been able to take time off with almost nothing to do. So, I decided to do as little as possible. That meant sticking my blog on the shelf.
Quick segue, here are some pictures:
Once I got back from vacation I walked face first into a wall of work. Les (the producer) decided to set a date for the late-alpha/early-beta testing. The date he selected was July 31st. That dropped a whole lot of work on the dev team. I thought it was going to be a light Monday, so I had already asked Dad E. to help me go pull a transmission from the Pull-A-Part. That turned out to be a mistake.
Just before he got to the house I got the e-mail from Les. They wanted to set the date in stone and move on it. They also wanted me in a meeting at 7AM on Tuesday to discuss a number of details. Well, Dad E. and I decided to carry on and go get the transmission. They didn't have one in Augusta so we headed on to Columbia to pull one. To make a long story short it took us a good deal of time and I didn't get back to the house until around 6PM.
After I finally got out of the shower (I was covered in grease) I checked my e-mail. One of the programmers wanted me to make some changes to the wiki. As we were running out of time I decided to work on that for a few hours before I went to bed. During the rest of the week I put in between 40 and 50 hours working on a new wiki template. It was a lot of work, but it was worth it in the end.
I worked through the weekend and the following week. I got the spell information updated in the wiki for the spells that we actually have in game. By Thursday I was done and we had a new internal build up on Steam. I grabbed it and played it for a few hours, finding bugs and what have you. I turned that over to the team and we got a new build put together late Friday afternoon. I play tested it for about an hour and decided to roll it out to our testers. That was another mistake.
As it turns out I missed a number of bugs that recently crept into the code. I've spent a good part of this weekend clicking “refresh” on my web browser and assuring play testers that we're working hard to refine the game. It's made the weekend feel long and me feel tired, lol. Still, it represents real progress. I expect to have a much more stable (and fun) build up by the end of this week. That will put us one step closer to the full beta. And I thank the Lord for it :)
I'm going to wrap it up here because I'm worn down and ready to go watch TV. Before I do I have to go click “refresh” again, but that's just part of the job. Either way, for the moment at least, I wish you good night from South Carolina.
