Hey folks!
Well the main event has ended, but we're not done! For the next 3 weeks (:star:), we need you to play, rate, and leave feedback on games! Do you want a score at the end? Playing, rating, and leaving quality feedback helps others find your game!
Visit the event's games page to start:
/events/ludum-dare/40/games
(:star:) Just an FYI, the end was bumped to December 28th due to the holidays. Results day would have been December 26th (Boxing Day), and making December 25 (Xmas) my prep day just isn't going to work. The results themselves will come a few hours later than the clock over there says. -->
Game Filtering Disabled. Replacement Coming
My apologies, but I spent my entire day today doing support. When that happens, usually means something about the website or event is causing some serious confusion. The number of message I had to send to folks reassuring them that their game was fine was staggering. The root of that: the filter box on the games page.
To avoid any further confusion, I've disabled the filter box on games page. A replacement was supposed to go live earlier today, but I was so caught-up doing support I didn't get a chance to do anything else.
Minor Improvements
While folks sleep, I've since bumped the default game pages to fetch 24 games at a time instead 12, and changed the default width to 4 instead of 3.
Not much, but it should make playing and rating nicer.
Is my game submitted properly?
If you want to confirm that your game is good, visit your game page. Your game is good if you don't see a blue "Unpublished Game" bar.
However if you do, there's an error message you should have seen when you clicked Publish (bug).
- Post/Game titles must be a minimum of 3 alpha-numeric characters long. Any shorter and the Search Engine wont index it. In the future we will allow 1 character names, but the URL itself will automatically pad itself to 3 characters, and we'll have to give you a warning ("can't index names shorter than 3 characters, are you sure").
- Some keywords are reserved, like
admin, compo, jam, karma, and at the moment we simply don't allow them as names. This is partially a bug. We can (and will) allow you to use these names, but your URL will have to be padded so not to conflict with the reserved names.
My apologies for the seemingly obvious bugs. I was so caught up with the up-time issues last event that these were forgotten.
Feel free to reach out to me if you're still having problems: /contact
When is Ludum Dare 41?
April 2018. Check back in 3 weeks on results day for the date announcement.
Improved Game Filtering Explained
This is coming. I'm too tired to finish this tonight, but soon. Hoping to have something tomorrow night (if nothing else, a half solution).
This missed last LD due to some bad decisions I made about how the internals of the site work (i.e. our general purpose metadata table contained all its history too). This way over-complicated things (wasteful table JOIN's) and it hurt performance. There was also a 2nd table that did the same thing as metadata, but it added some extra fields. Tagging and multiple authors was implemented in this table, but the data that specified your platform was in the other table. To do this properly (and simplify future queries), history had to be extracted, and these two data tables had to be merged.
You probably didn't notice anything was different, so that's how you know it went well. There was an API breakage, but I'm still waiting to hear a complaint from someone outside the dev team.
(NB. If your app broke, note that the link field of nodes is now gone. Links co-exist inside meta now, same keys as before)
There's still the issue of converting the platform data in to a tag, but that's a task for after I've slept.
With the scary changes above out of the way I switched my focus to search.
Search
You might have seen me say Search Engine. We're actually running a 3rd server now dedicated to search. It runs Sphinx Search with the real-time Indexes backend for those that want something to read about. It's also the first server type in our infrastructure I can destroy and spin-up replacements on demand. Long story short, it's a full and proper search backend that lets us do most things that you can do with Google. Nice. Having a real search backend is super important for later, once we migrate the old game data and blog posts over (30+ events worth). Also future stuff.
The problem is this was a week ago, and I had to prioritize a few other things before I could start on the search API and UI. So we have a server, we can search the data (super fast I might add), but there's no API and UI for it. Hence why I left Search off the new features list: I wasn't confident it would make it in before the event.
The woes of backend dev
Me and a couple of the guys in the LD dev channel spent the past few months in the backend. Backends aren't pretty, but thanks to backend work we were able to survive all weekend long without any noticeable outages (some slow spikes, but that's all). If we've done our job, you don't notice we've done anything at all. I can't say we went unnoticed this time, but pending some catastrophe, things wont get worse.
I did take a few days this week to tackle some of the UI low hanging fruit. If you've ever worked with a publisher or client, you might know about spending time on things for a milestone just because they look like progress. Not everyone is an engineer (not everyone should be). I didn't get as far as I would liked (Home page and User pages have new tab interface, but not Game or Event pages). Hopefully it's enough to see where were going with this.
After a rough couple events, I'm extremely happy that the website performance problems are less a problem now. To quote one of my favourite sayings, the first 90% is done. Now for the second 90%. :wink:
