ButtonWeavers blog

Our implementation of Button Men isn't perfect. Nor is it complete. In fact, at the time of writing this blog post, we have 396 open issues worth of imperfection and incompleteness. However, we also have 775 closed issues worth of completeness. If you haven't yet taken a look at our issue tracker on Github , you might find it interesting to have a browse. I find that browsing issues in chronological order helps me to keep my perspective on what we've already achieved. For example, our oldest open issue has an issue number of 108 , and there are only 10 issues still open with an issue number less than 200. Of course, this is slightly confounded by the fact that pull requests (which contain submitted bits of code) use the same numbering system as issues, and that pull requests make up roughly half of the total number of issues. But even so, that means that we have addressed roughly 90% of the issues from the first 100 real (non-pull-request) issues. Since we have 39...

A number of years ago, Chaos suggested that we deploy Button Men site updates on a regular deployment cycle. Personally, I had never deployed according to a regular deployment cycle before, not at uni or at work, so I didn't know why such a cycle would be useful, but I was more than happy to accept from Chaos's experience at her work that we would see benefits. For a long time, we had a deployment cycle that looked like this: the second and third weeks of the month were for accepting any pull requests that had passed code review and unit testing the last week of the month was for testing on a test server to attempt to find bugs in the code originating from recently accepted pull requests the first week of the month was a merge freeze, designed to allow us to focus on fixing bugs caused by the deployment to the live site This cycle worked quite well, I think, but there was always a large amount of work for the testers to be done in the one week before deployment, and ver...

Updates are exciting in any web game, because they are a tangible demonstration to users that the devs are still actively maintaining and improving the site. Bugs get fixed, the user interface becomes easier to use, and every so often, new features see the light of day. However, to some users, it may seem that site updates on Button Men Online are few and far between. For a while, we were successful in maintaining a monthly release cycle, but that's proven to be impractical over the long term. So, why does it take so long to bring you new features? The most important consideration here is that the devs are busy people. One of the overriding considerations that we have always tried to honour is that Real Life comes first. So, while we might have nominal deadlines, these will always give way in the face of illness, work commitments and social events. We develop Button Men Online because we love both the game and the community, and we don't want the task of developing to becom...