Thursday, February 11, 2010

Stuff we are working on

Rather than my usual posting of vague generalities about things progressing and what not. I figure Ill lay things out a bit more for you all. We put the finishing (at least for now) touches on the User Interface a while ago. For those of you that participated in the first round of testing things will pretty much look the same however there were some deep structural changes under the hood, so to speak, thanks to your feedback. With the UI done for now I recently started working on the scheduling system. Basically the game was originally intended with a weekly turn system. After gathering some feedback it became apparent that more people would want to play with a daily turn system. The difference between the two is actually pretty minimal, but the trick here was figuring out that it was going to alter the overall data flow slightly (scheduler->serverScripts->DB->serverScripts->game->serverScripts...and so on) and exactly how I was supposed to let users (you all) choose between schedule types. So after some research we settled on jQuery (a javascript library) which has some pretty slick hide and show functions. So you can now see the results on the start a game page. It doesnt look very impressive, but that page is where the data flow for a game originates and there is some mildly complicated stuff in there.
So now that the schedule system is done Im off and running on what we call "the backend" (or the actual game engine). The backend has been in production since our inception with Clarke doing the heavy lifting, but since we are in the sprint to the finish now its all hands on deck (except for Kate who is launching into our post-game evaluation and points distribution system).
Anyway thats the current state of things, thanks for checking in.
Jeff

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