Plan for Jay Barnson

Frantic finishing touches and scary last-minute changes
The GG thread that recently appeared on increasing conversion rate was sufficiently wince-inducing to force me to go back and make some changes to the multiplayer and demo versions of Void War. This is somewhat alleviated by the fact that I'd actually planned at one point to do these things, and designed the architecture around it. But as we grew closer to release, I convinced myself that these things weren't important. That thread made me realize that I probably need to shift my priorities a bit, and it's better to delay the release a couple of days if I have to.

I'm Still not sure if all the changes will make them in - I'm extremely shy of making risky changes close to release, especially with all the extra testing it will involve. Fortunately source control means you can always back out of changes if they prove too frightening. But still - ugh.

I found out that my last beta was somehow working IN SPITE of a critical error. Those are the ones that scare me the most. Nobody complained - the game seemed to work for everyone, and I verified it seemed to work for me when I re-installed the previous version and tested it early this morning. The latest executable chokes on the missing file, but for some bizarre reason the previous one went blithely along. Hopefully every installation did exactly the same thing... it's more than a little embarassing if a game crashes on mission 2 on a reviewer's machine. I've received a SLEW of new, finalized content in just the last ten days (with more forthcoming before our drop-dead date Monday morning).

Release Woes
Maybe I'm making something that should be easy too hard on myself, but YE GODS there's a lot to do to prepare for a release. I thought an on-line release would be EASY, once upon a time. Oh, to be so foolish and ignorant again.

There's getting the demo version ready. There's setting up things with the e-commerce provider. Testing that out. Website redesign for sales. Licensing. There's getting the bandwidth to host the demo version. There's planning ahead for updates. Server-side support of the game (it's a multiplayer game, so we've got a server tracking public games so people can join them.) Marketing efforts. Documentation. And of course there's GETTING THE GAME DONE. Polishing, fixing bugs, and --- ahem --- making the aforementioned last minute feature additions (I may yet rue those words...)

And I'm getting the pre-release jitters. The game's not perfect - no game ever is - but eventually you have to say, "This is it," and call it done. Well, until the next revision. Which hopefully will be made easier by our auto-patch utility we spent a lot of time getting working right last weekend. In spite of my experience releasing for major studios, the nightmares won't let up. I'm creating what I can politely refer to as a "foul up list" of possible screw-ups we can make for the launch. I'm trying to include every preventable catastrophe that I can think of, and that will form a checklist of things to check off before we make the game public.

Man, I hope this gets easier over time.

Torqued!
A scant few moons ago, I licensed the Torque engine. I imagined that I'd have plenty of time to tinker with it during the last phase of Void War's development. I don't recall smoking anything funny during that time, so I don't know how that foolish notion of having time entered my brain. I have a tough enough time finding five or six hours in a night to sleep between what's effectively TWO full-time jobs (one that pays the bills, the other that makes games...) and meeting family needs.

So I broke down and picked up Ken Finney's book - yay me. I haven't had the time (DOH!) to look into it in much detail, but at first glance it wasn't quite what I expected. While much of it is review, I like the densely-packed text and the lack of inane, goofy paragraphs that pad out the page count of way too many books of this kind. High signal-to-noise ratio, and a great resource even for experienced programmers looking to delve into the mysteries of Torque (and the common tools used in development with many Torque projects). I can't vouch for its usefulness to a pure beginner - but it looks like it'll be very handy to 'get me over the hump' as an experienced developer new to Torque.