While I’d hoped this summer would be a time of increased coding, working on Engineering Faith had to compete with other things like my day job, Budgetable, conferences, vacations, and other vital occupations. Now that I’m getting back into school mode, though, I’m back into Faith mode!
Admittedly, I have been afraid that while I was off working on other stuff, things would be going to hell - and not just some smartass making a Place of Worship called “Hell”. Surprisingly though, it’s actually been pretty stable. There haven’t been any insane explosions of followers, nothing new has broken horribly, nobody completely destroyed a game through a trivially abusable bug (although I’m sure it’s still possible). On the downside, it seems all the bugs that were there before are still there - odd, really.
The thing that struck me the most, though, is that even though I haven’t updated it in a while, and it’s still not ready for prime time, people are still playing. Just seeing that excites me and reminds me that I’ve created something cool - it just needs to be taken into the home stretch.
A big reason I think my work on Faith dropped off over the summer is that I was no longer seeing people who are playing it every day, like I was at school. Instead, I was seeing people who use our internal website at work every day, so I got more excited about that. As mind-numbing as generating quarterly contract renewal reports sounds, that kind of toil can be enjoyable if you’re really making people happy and making their lives easier. Basically, I’m a whore for user feedback.
As such, I decided I didn’t already have enough RSS news items to plough through every day, so I added an RSS feed to the bug tracker. It now keeps me instantly up to date about how things are going, and what bugs are, well, bugging. Gone are the dark ages where Altering Time bug reports go unnoticed because I’m simply at school, working, brushing my teeth, or even in bed. Wait… what have I done?
Especially now, know that your votes on bugs really do matter, and I’ll be attacking popularly requested fixes soon. As for when it’ll be out of beta, well for once I think I’ll give an absolutely firm date of