Week 15

Submitted by

Mat on Mon, 2017-05-22 18:38

Salve!

Probably the biggest news about the past week is that the Offline Coat Of Arms Creator is finally feature complete. It's been quite a frustrating experience as its been delayed for several weeks - so it's a big "phew" moment for me that it has finally happened.

Feature complete is still a tricky state though. It means it can still be buggy - tests are currently underway and we have already found a few errorenous situations - so there are only bugfixes ahead. We shouldn't see any unexpected compatibility issues. Or - they will be much less likely, to be more precise. It may also lack localized hints and texts - those are being added continuously.

^{That codex page will be full once we actually added all hints and info.}

We're going to post a separate article about the Coat of Arms a bit later, before, or in tandem with releasing it to you.

While the delay was extremely frustrating, it's a good sign that it wasn't due to underestimating the Creator's implementation cost - we actually finished it early compared to the originally estimated coding hours. The "reality check" part of the story is that I still burned way more hours on the project since it's restart than was healthy (or that I was expecting), and that's exactly what made this version delayed. It seems we both had some extremely bad luck and I also underestimated the support cost of the other tasks that required my participation to keep things going.

Hopefully, there will be less obstacles on the next level, and I'll also be more prepared for the unexpected. Even if that sounds silly. :)

Below is the short breakdown of the past week:

Weekly Status

Game Client

Offline CoA Creator is feature completed. Bugfixing, content upload is underway.
I've updated my tools to generate an offline "snapshot" for the CoA, so it can work without the server, and the code to actually read it from the disk instead of the cloud. I've also added some heraldic content to the hints & writings (though it's not nearly done yet).
We continued to work on the Map with Sándor.

Platform & Server

Steve and Gábor had a massive spree of bugfixing. The Platform lives in the Cloud.
Steve continued working on the Collectibles logic.
Gábor completed most of the admin views of the Platform.

Website