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Dev Diary 16 :: 2016 :: February
#1
It's on its way, finally. In less than a few days public testing will be available on the new service.

For months i've been working on the new client and server to run on a new (mostly self hosted) backend service because of Yahoo's diminishing quality of service. Sure enough it was within fair time considering the company is going downhill faster than a ton of bricks.

With the huge lack of updates in IOU during this period I have certainly disappointed a lot of players, who understandably felt like nothing was being done, and that the game development itself was sitting idle. Beyond that there has been a massive misconception about the amount of development effort that has been going on, or whether this service transfer will ever occur.

So let me offer some quick points:

  1. Most of the service issues on Yahoo will probably never get better. They have only gotten worse and the major bugs that were reported were promised to be fixed in short time....it has been over 7 months and none of that was done. The entire team behind the backend seems to have dropped out with a single guy running the show.
  2. Yahoo is shutting down a ton of its services, including Yahoo Games, which is the primary component to what the backend was seemingly integrated for - so that more than likely means the backend itself is going to shut down in due time. If anyone thought that working on this backend transfer was a mistake over working on much needed features first, unfortunately that would have likely resulted in the game dying this year. Instead once we hit a good level of stability on the new service, we're in for a long-run of constant updates again, with the game able to live on for many years to come.
  3. The new service was not designed to just host the game away from Yahoo. The entire structure of this design has been around the ability to significantly improve the game as a whole and allow for features and resolutions to things that never would have otherwise been possible.
  4. It has been insinuated that development has stopped and the game has just been raking in purchases. This is insulting due to the fact that for quite a while costs have far surpassed revenue in order to get this development done; where if those insinuations had any merit, I would have just been developing features to ensure growing sales over trying to ensure I can keep my promises of the features I intended in the long-run for the game, for integrity reasons. 
  5. These service issues have been completely out of my control, and even so, I have felt terrible that players have become disappointed with the lack of updates and with me. It was never in my imagination that I would be stuck rewriting the same game twice....I imagined being able to continue giving the community great features to the game they loved, and enjoying the hell out of myself (I love working on this game, and the community within it!). I have spent every single day last year and this year so far working on this game, and during this transfer, the hours put into development have been very unhealthy. I will do everything in my power to get IOU back on its feet once this service transfer occurs, because I really want to enjoy working on this game again.
Now, for the service transfer:

When?
I will be opening up public testing in well under a week. Once we find that it appears stable and the worst of the issues are cleaned up, we'll go live.

Will the game go down?
We have investigated several methods to attempt to keep this as minimal as possible, however Yahoo refuses to give me account authentication on my own iourpg.com users, meaning I have to come up with some ridiculous method to transfer those accounts over. Unfortunately this may mean a half day of the game being put offline for the transfer to occur. We'll experiment with other solutions to try to keep it as passive and minimal as possible though.

How long until you consider 'stable'?
When the reports of server-related issues has diminished to a very low level, and those issues can be easily rectified with tools we'll develop in real-time to rectify any issues that do arise. I suspect a few days - me and the new programmer are absolutely exhausted with this, but we're going to be working non-stop while getting this going.

Can I help test?
Hell yes you can. In fact, PLEASE help test this. The initial tests will require new account creations, and other details will be described, however the more testing that occurs, the more information we can acquire.

New service, then what?
Then we have public meetings about the immediate issues that have lingered in the game. I expect that will start with discussions about: Offline Gains, hindrance, Guild buildings, next game mode. From there we can have potentially weekly meetings for new developments and how we can improve this game and the community behind it.

If you think you're tired of the lack of updates...i'm sure you are, but trust me, i'm 3rd degree burnt out trying to get through all this just so I can enjoy working on features again, and maybe get normal sleep and work relatively normal hours. I appreciate how patient the majority of the community has been, and my goals will be quite simple and specific after this: Making this nation game great again. (Joking aside, it really is what i'm looking most forward to)



Ray
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#2
The new service, is incredibly close, and everyone will be able to test the stability of things very soon in the next and potentially final test phase with the data transfer for all portals.

However, that also means other great things are coming up:

Upcoming Discussions

Shortly after the official service transfer, we'll be setting a time to publicly discuss the future of IOU. We'll be starting with the more immediate issues before jumping deep into the major feature systems.

Discussing this among yourselves before then is fine but please do not attempt to pick at the topics with the team before-hand as the final layout and decisions of these topics won't be founded until the official public discussion.

The starting topics will be:
  • Offline Gains
  • New Guild Building and Building Balances (Upkeep as one of the topics)
  • Hindrance System Reversal (Psychological - setting requirements higher while removing hindrance rates)



Next Steps Topics will also be included in this discussion. However the above are the primary focus for February at this point.
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#3
The transfer finally has an expected release date. Please read more at:

https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?s...6674851481
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#4
We're moving about as swiftly as we can with updates while tackling post-transfer issues, and redesigning some of the backend systems to adhere to our goals and expectations.

As we get through these updates and go through community discussions, we will definitely get closer to bigger content updates.

Right now there's an assortment of players having issues connecting to guilds, even parties sometimes. We also have players no longer able to play from work or campus, and this transfer was not intended to create limitations, but do the opposite....so please bear with the fact that we still have some issues to kink out.

Ray
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