General update

[MysteryMan]

I owe you all a general update, so here it is.

The team is very focused on getting a prototype of the new battle engine up by June or July. We are shifting gears constantly to make sure we stick on a b-line for that goal.

The hires are getting into grooves and some teams are producing at faster than expected, especially the art team. Here's an example of what our 3d artist made in a day. The art team is beginning to produce at rates a lot faster than i anticipated.

The game dev group is still working on proof of concepts for flash engines to prove that we can get everything done and there will be no weird unknowns down the line. Right now we settled on Flash native and Photon but still need proof of concepts. I may shift gears from the file editor to have Alex work directly with the art team and get the UI ready as fast as possible.

The marketing team is almost done with their first release and it's rather pretty if you ask me.

The core game team is working on a few surprises which are freaking awesome if you ask me but it's up to logress to see when they'll be announced.

I just hired Jim, the man was the glue of making ConnectiCon a 10,0000+ attendee behemoth (VP), and he's working on improving communication around the board. He's like an artist like that and i wish we hired him earlier.

The IT staff is almost done mapping out where we are and our major pain points and we'll be working on moving to a new model bit by bit every week.

The backend team - which is my team, is still under-performing and the main bottleneck. We need to hire more on that area to fill out the need so the lack of speed there doesn't slow down the rest of development. Adding that simple problem solving question to the application reduced the entries from over 40 to under a dozen of much higher quality. It'll take a few weeks for them to get to the speed the other departments are going, but things are still going well.

[MysteryMan]

Alex is working on taking a sphere of alex's and compiling it to mobile and flash.

Awani, our new guy, is taking over the backend work that i'm lagging behind on. He's plugging away very quickly so it looks like that bottleneck will disappear.

[MysteryMan]

Tons of great stuff - I've been booked making sure everything happens. I'll probably have the team leads start posting their own updates on a blog.

[Quigleaf]

Tons of great stuff - I've been booked making sure everything happens. I'll probably have the team leads start posting their own updates on a blog.

Currently Cashier seems to be working perfectly, but PayPal transactions are not being processed. Not sure if it is Ultimate Pay or PayPal the culprit, since Alteil's page is ok.

As players is not that much of a big deal, but guess it is for you, that's why I'm posting it.

UPDATE:

PP is working fine now.

[MysteryMan]

Tons of great stuff - I've been booked making sure everything happens. I'll probably have the team leads start posting their own updates on a blog.

Currently Cashier seems to be working perfectly, but PayPal transactions are not being processed. Not sure if it is Ultimate Pay or PayPal the culprit, since Alteil's page is ok.

As players is not that much of a big deal, but guess it is for you, that's why I'm posting it.

UPDATE:

PP is working fine now.

Would you mind elaborating on what happened when it was down? There were no known issues during the time you said there was a problem, so that concerns me.

[Quigleaf]

Tons of great stuff - I've been booked making sure everything happens. I'll probably have the team leads start posting their own updates on a blog.

PayPal transactions are not being processed. Not sure if it is Ultimate Pay or PayPal the culprit, since Alteil's page is ok.

As players is not that much of a big deal, but guess it is for you, that's why I'm posting it.

UPDATE:

PP is working fine now.

Would you mind elaborating on what happened when it was down? There were no known issues during the time you said there was a problem, so that concerns me.

For a few hours, after selecting Paypal in the payment options tab, instead of being prompted to the log in page of Paypal you were redirected to the Paypal issues page, where it instructed you not to use the "Back" button of your browser, close the window and try again.

Tested it a few times in different PC's, same results. Asked around in chat so other people could test it, same results.

But now is working fine. If you didn't fix it guess it was PP's problem.

[MysteryMan]

Still working nonstop.

New public facing JSON API will be up soon

[gadu]

What does any of this mean?

[Romdeau]

What does any of this mean?

Bacon.

[shadowsketch]

Still working nonstop.

New public facing JSON API will be up soon

What does any of this mean?

So JSON is a data format popular on the web. I've seen sites that take in parameters and give back information -- for example Twitter allows you to get information about tweets if you give it information about the date, the user, etc.

For sure I can see this working with the card database, making searching much more easier and cleaner. And since it's a public facing API, could this mean...Alteil fansites? I look forward to what you all have in store.