Still At It

Today has been an odd day. We started moving into the new house (mainly without my help due to work) and I've been working on getting a playable version of the battle board into the backers hands. The pictures are just going to be what I managed to take during breaks in the yard and of my work. I hope you guys like them anyway.


So, the day started with me seeing that the programming team had put up a new build of the game to test. The art team had started testing and already found a number of issues and had some feature requests. The art team gives very good feedback because they haven't been working on the game the whole time so they're “inexperienced” with it. That makes their feedback very valuable. If something throws them off you can be pretty sure it's going to throw the backers off as well.


So, for the first few hours I was sending e-mails, posting messages, and getting a “feedback system” put in place. The artists gave us so much feedback that I realized we were going to have a good system in place to collect and sort the feedback we get from our 2000+ backers. That's not to mention the users we may have pouring in after we open it to the public. Of course, we're going to start with a handful of backers to see if we can't knockout any big, common issues. I'm hoping we can get it to all the backers before the end of the weekend, but that depends on how much OT the team feels up to.


Either way, today I put together a couple of Wiki pages for bug reports and feature suggestions. Once we've released the battle board to the backers I'll start a thread (or two) in the forums. I'll be able to take bug reports and feature requests as they come in and add them to the Wiki. Then, as the programming team makes progress, I'll update the pages with what's been done. I'm hoping this will help keep the backers “in the loop” while at the same time streamlining the feedback for the team.


After I got all that done I had to download the current build of the battle board and take it for a test drive myself. It looked good, but I had a couple of feature changes I wanted and I ran into a few bugs. One of them was real good and left the team head scratching for a few minutes, lol. In fact, they are still at it and it's 11:26PM there. It's been a long day for them and it looks like it could be a long weekend. Still, it will be worth it when the backers are singing their praises.


I'm currently waiting on them to send me the last build of the day. Once I get that I plan to shoot it out to a small test group of backers (and maybe a few close personal friends). Then I'll have to babysit it for a few minutes and answer any questions they may have. With their feedback we may be able to get it prepped up and roll it out to all the backers. After all, that's the real goal at this stage. Once we've gotten enough backer feedback to refine the board we'll probably open it up to the public.


For the time being I'm going to run. I've still got stuff to do tonight, including taking two truck loads to the new house. So, goodnight from South Carolina!