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 Chaos, Jota, Fog, and myself.

The issues we addressed include all sorts of infrastructure and API tweaks, changes to the user interface, bug fixes, expansion of information visible to players, automation (including autopass, surrender, and the navigation bar), and the addition of QUnit unit tests for our Javascript. Much of the work of completing the button roster happened in this period. There were also a whole pile of new skills: berserk, focus, chance, konstant, morphing, doppelganger, auxiliary, and reserve. To deal with skill interactions, we added skill ordering to ensure that die hooks fired in the correct order. The first button special skill, with associated button hooks, was implemented to enable the button Echo.

Naturally, all the developers were rather tired after this extended coding sprint, but this didn't stop us from continuing to be extremely active. The enthusiasm of newly arrived players helped us to stay motivated to maintain our high rate of development for three months after opening the site up to the general public. As the site progressively became more stable and user friendly, we were able to scale back our level of support to a more manageable level without compromising on squashing critical or painful bugs.

To this day, we continue to enjoy the fruits of what we established back then, a stable open-source site with unit and regression testing and continuous integration, with automated deployment into a hosted virtual instance. Many thanks go out to those first alpha testers, and to the dedicated developers who took part in the hard work to get our site ready to be shown to the public. And thanks also to those players who stuck with us and encouraged us through the somewhat bumpy ride in the early days after we went live.

It was fun, but I'm glad that frenetic phase of development is over.

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