Alpha 2 - Coming Soon

The second release of the Alpha feature set should be hitting prod later this week.
The first Beta release will probably be next week at the earliest.

The biggest tasks remaining required by Beta are related to subscriptions and PayPal integration.

The Alpha site has had only 2 different users so far. I hope to be asking a few more friends to try it and give feedback before I open the site up to a wider audience. This may not happen before Beta, but certainly during and after Beta.

Mike

Alpha Launch

The site reached alpha launch a few days ago. It is now running in a production hosted environment, and accessible over the Internet. And humming along nicely. Though in a very minimalistic state of featurefulness, and with no significant traffic since only a few people knew that it was up. I'm going to keep it that way for probably a few weeks more while I hammer out more features and address issues related to the addition of a production environment.

In a mostly (but not completely) unrelated piece of news, I got to visit a Google office this week, and attend a presentation by Adrian Holovaty, the creator of Django. I admire both Google and Django so it was a pretty cool experience.

Mike

Status Update

The buildout of my game website is almost done (enough) for an alpha launch. I converted it over from using Django's built-in dev-only server to using Apache+mod_python this week, which was a critical path item. Also got HTTPS working for all login/subscribe/buy-related parts of the site.

Also at alpha launch of the website (or soon thereafter) will be a web browser-based online game. It is currently mostly complete in terms of alpha feature set. Additionally, the standalone/offline strategy game Shattered Stars may see the light of day soon as well. It's actually sitting at about 99% complete and has been so for a looong time, for various reasons. But the beauty of code is that it's essentially timeless and unchanging, which is convenient if something is worked on in fits and starts.

Mike