Crunch Time for Us

Well, we've handed in our alpha of the game.
It was a miserable defeat, our standard for the alpha was not even close to the teachers' standard.
But we promised ourselves, that this won't deter us from completing the game, or a good portion of it.

The alpha was due Monday (of this week).
All through the weekend before the alpha, I worked my ass of and the backend code, it was finally finished Saturday night.
I checked it in to my nifty little SVN, and uploaded the code to the actual site, where the game runs.
Then I went out for a drink and went to sleep a happy camper, not aware of what's going to happen the next day.

Sunday came along, some of the classes were canceled so, we had a good head start on the integration of the client and server, at that afternoon.
We started connecting stuff together, messages from the server were getting in and everything looked pretty good.

At about midnight, we uploaded the offline-working client to see how it works online.
It had some bugs to say the least, some stuff we haven't considered, etc.
Fix the bugs, re-upload, more bugs, rinse and repeat.
At about 1AM we actually made some really big changes to the code, it wasn't a really good idea, but things seemed to work after that.
At about 2:00AM we decided to try and access it from all 3 of our computers, simultaneously.
It didn't work, well, some of the computers works, others didn't, a pretty shitty situation considering this is an online multiplayer game.
We bashed at this problem until 3:30AM with no solution, we then wisely decided to leave it and come back to it in the morning, the hand in was at 11:00AM...

On the morning of the alpha hand in, we checked the game in the computer lab...
Same thing, some work some don't, eventually we just gave up, we decided to show the game from a computer that the game worked on and that's it.
As I said before the it wasn't pretty...
We were not very pleased with the outcome, it was pretty depressing to see all that dedication go to waste, but we will soldier on...

As for me, a few lessons were learned:

1. Don't leave the integration and deployment for the last day
2. I have to learn how to deploy a site
3. Put the goals of the project in relevance to the time given
4. If the project's milestones are not reached at their time, remove some features, don't continue as if nothing happened
5. Showing the core gameplay is very very important
   

anyway,

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Now playing: Silje Nergaard - Beachcomber
via FoxyTunes keeping on...