A short history of the closed alpha testing period
Once upon a time, there was a site where almost everything worked, sort of. And then things broke. You'll find the extended story of the resurrection of Button Men Online here , but that story ends with the announcement that Button Men Online would be opening for testing by dedicated testers in November 2013. This is the continuation of that story. After we opened the website to testers, the developers pushed really hard — or probably more accurately, I pushed the developers really hard — to get the website to a state where we were willing to open it up to the general public, starting with players from the old site. Our closed Github milestones show that the website spent three and a half months in this period of closed alpha testing. In this time, we somehow managed to close 162 issues, which works out to be more than one issue a day! This spike in activity between December 2013 and March 2014 is quite obvious on the Github contribution graphs for Chao...