A New Era for Hack Wars

Yesterday the Hack Wars development team had an extremely constructive meeting. Very rarely in the current team's history did the Hack Wars development team seem completely unified. Everything was pretty scattered. Megabytes (possibly Gigabytes) of data is saved by each team member in several forms such as documents with notes, design diagrams, task lists, etc. Nothing really had a set sense of direction for us as a whole. Of course we have major plans for development for this year. Even though the first month is nearly over, we finally have things setup to better develop a tiny, bug-ridden and feature-dry MMORPG into a large, clean and feature-rich game which any gamer can like and any programmer/developer can love.

New Development Methods for Hack Wars
Of course this is always a plus, right? Well, for Hack Wars our methods were pretty barbaric and brute-forced attempts at an actual method of progressive development. Very poor tracking, lack of tools (or just lack of tools being used). We also threw a lot of weight into content and features which left the game's core engine severely bloated and unbalanced.

Not anymore. The Hack Wars team has reformed and will be taking a huge leap into a more professional hierarchal and structured method of development. Before, we were developing and updating directly from a single 'trunk'. While this method was just barely okay for simple small tasks and updates, creating a huge feature/fix lead to very big problems. Not to mention if one developer updated their working copy of source before another committed large changes, those changes could be lost due to an accidental overwrite. This has been remedied by restructuring the code-base a bit to separate live from development.

We now have a different system of development and a much easier method of keeping large projects within the source able to be developed separately from small updates. This will allow us to maintain a much more smooth process for updating the live Hack Wars server. We now have a plan for at least a small update/release every 2 weeks.

A Whole New Team
No, nobody was replaced. Nobody left and nobody joined. The Hack Wars Development Team has reformed, regrouped and is (and will continue to) maintain constant communication and a much more team-friendly approach to development. No longer will certain members be 'out of the loop'. No longer will developers have a 'blackout period' of falling off the face of the Earth.

The primary developers (owners) of Hack Wars have been busy and successful in their lives outside of Hack Wars development with doctorates and major thesis developments. Not to mention Ben (aka Johnny_Heart) is a developer for FreshBooks, who recently had a major update/release. Our leaders-in-development have finally reached a point where they can take a slight breather and get back to their fun project - Hack Wars.

We've all agreed to several things that will benefit Hack Wars on a massive scale. These things include proper development methods (as stated above), better bug/feature tracking (especially documenting/noting changes), constant releases (even if very small) and much more interaction with everything involved in Hack Wars.

What's this mean for Hackstock?
The primary focus for my role within the team is content design and development. This is usually system-driven entities, concepts, currencies and anything else the players of Hack Wars interact with which extends the core-functionality and gameplay of the game engine and core. For Hackstock, the new elements laid out for our team means a lot of work at first which will pay off greatly in the long run.

First, I'll re-enter a major design phase. The new designs being created will be much easier to manage and share data that is based on the designs. Once the designs are complete (at least ready for initial development), developing a few systems/methods linking design to implementation will be created. The best part, I'm hoping to design/develop a system that will take a lot of the 'chore'-work out of content creation and management; something a bit more efficient and reliable.

We (the Hack Wars Development Team) have a much more definitive plan of action and a clear path in Hack Wars development. Time to fit my designs to that plan and help develop Hack Wars in several smaller hops rather than huge inaccurate leaps.