Xmas 2010
The Xmas 2010 is out and what a wild ride it has been. icon_xp.gif
A lot of people have pointed out that this event seemed last minute and was quickly thrown together. And to those people all I have to say is... Yes, you are absolutely correct. To statements about us being lazy? Maybe, but it's more like we were hit by series of unfortunate events. Here's the untold story of the development of Xmas 2010:
On a dark and stormy night... heh, no not really, it was broad daylight about a month and a half ago. We began having meetings to plan the Xmas 2010 event. Originally it was the priority of another team (for the first time ever sponsorships and events were separated into two separate teams, except not really since the devs on the "events" team were just people from the sponsorship team "reassigned".) I was assigned to the project as a support dev while Ramoneguru would have been the primary dev. Then a couple of weeks later... Layoffs.
We lost almost all devs and the project manager assigned to the project. The Sponsorship team was hit pretty hard, being reduced to Ferminator our technical lead, Ubermegatron, myself and on the flash side The Ninja Wizard. Nothing production wise happened the week of the layoff, it was just before Thanksgiving and office moral was understandably at an all time low.
Upon our return, being the last project manager in the office, Indy_Cole assumed the duties of managing the Xmas event. After re-evaluating what our resources were he quickly reformed the event team, which was myself as the lead developer for the project and my technical lead Ferminator (...so my boss technically reported to me for the event...yeah, that was weird...), along with what artists we could muster. Ferminator was assigned the madlibs, forum, and event landing page and I was responsible for everything else.
To add insult to injury, days after beginning production for the event we learned Ferminator would be leaving the company to per sue other career opportunities. Up to and including his last day in the office Ferminator worked overtime to get as much of his side of things done as possible and for that I am ever grateful.
From Monday the 6th to Monday the 13th end of day, I spent 111 hours working on the event. For you younger folks or those who don't want to do the math... a normal work week is 40 hours for most salaried jobs. I crammed almost 3 weeks of work into 1, something I've never done before and can't say I'm much in a hurry to do again, haha. With Ferminators departure I was left with not only my own work but programming the event page and the remaining forum stuff he wasn't able to get to. The build made it to our QA (Quality Assurance) dept. Early Tuesday and from there I spent the days leading up to the event launch fixing event bugs both mine and Ferminators.
This being my first major event (I've worked on mini events but just trust me the feeling is quite different knowing it's one of Gaia's "Primary" events.) I was nervous with the results and how it would be received annnnd how the code would hold up to so many active participants at once. In the grand scheme of things, it help up just fine. There are some annoying bugs some of which didn't manifest until launch but the event is playable and completable.
Part of my duties being the lead for this event is the oversight of the elf roleplayers. I knew from the beginning I wanted to have some roleplay as part of the event. I believe it ads a fun dynamic that just can't be achieved through static story content. As we neared the end of production I noticed we had one extra item that wasn't being used anywhere in the event. So, last minute, day of the launch in fact. I granted a bunch to the npc roleplayers and let them distribute them as they saw fit. At this point I was so tired and burned out I didn't think anything of it. It was not until I came into the office this morning and started thinking about it did I realize just how rare that item would be, which was the opposite of the intended goal. I wanted the item to reach as many people as possible so instead I created a grant link for the item and asked the roleplayers to put the link in their sigs making the item far more accessible. icon_smile.gif
And that concludes my Xmas tale. Aside from writing this entry I am working on fixing what bugs I can for the event. I won't lie though some may go unfixed, particularly the clicking on one item bug but the grant page telling you that you clicked on another. This won't go unfixed because it's not important but simply because it will require some significant changes that just won't make it out of QA in time for the conclusion of the event, and therefore not worth assigning resources to.
Somewhere in all this madness I was promoted, to what I'm not even quite sure yet (I'm assuming I'll be told once the right people figure it all out, haha), all I know for now is when I say the words "my team" it actually is "my team" and I report to Indy_Cole but what my role formally is has yet to be defined, the sponsorships and event teams are... once again... the same team or rather that is to say for the time being my team will be handling them until someone says otherwise.
So my first "major" event if you can call it that. Literally put together at the last minute, using whatever existing functionality we felt we could modify in time with me for the most part being the sole dev responsible for everything >.< ...Fleep how did you do it!!.... icon_smile.gif
Hopefully most of you are enjoying it, it's not much but I know myself and a lot of other people put a lot of their spare time hearts and souls in making this happen so quickly. It may have been scraped together and last minute but let it not be said it was done with no love for the users, quite the contrary.
Soon the cash tree will be re-launching. While I was busy with the event Fleep was contracted to add functionality and make enhancement to the system, sadly he was not able to add an opt out option in time for the next release. So the next time you see it please expect to not have that feature available. That said we were listening to you guys about adding that to the cash tree and my team will make those changes as soon as we can find the time.
Until next time...
Narumi Misuhara
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