Back on Track

So the world eventually righted itself after a rather tumultuous past few days.

This has been a good lesson about how completely communication can fail and the consequences of when it does. To be fair to everyone, we all made mistakes. So let me lay out what happened.

Here in the office its T- till doomsday, when we have to ship it off to Apple. We are constantly testing, gathering data, triaging our problems & attempting to find the quickest/stablest solution possible. In short, we are in crisis mode. We are reacting quickly to any & all feedback coming in.

So when we hear that our tutorial is a completely failing system from someone who has been in the industry a lot longer than we have, we trust that they are a good indicator.

Naturally we respond, re-prioritize & begin work.

The thing is there was a lag time in communication. Our publisher meant to supply us with more in-depth information regarding why they believed the tutorial does not function properly, they just wanted to give us a heads-up about some of it. While this has great intentions, it caused us to over-correct & over-react.

Thankfully phone conversations ensued & we course corrected. There were some losses though. During this I lost about 10 hours working on something that would never get implemented, at this late in the game that can be pretty serious. Mike stepped in though & took over what I was would have done though (had I not been re-writing the tutorial), allowing us to stay on track.

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Learned some stuff about push notifications this morning. In order for a device to send a notification to another device, ie: "Its Your Turn" or "Game Over" or "You have a Game Invite" you need to be hosting your own server.

Why?

Well, because in order to send this information, some pretty important data needs to be passed back & forth between you & Urban Airship, the guys who actually send out the Push Notifications. This information could be sent over the web from the phone, but doing so is completely unsecured. Any script kiddie could intercept the data & begin broadcasting messages to all of your users.

To avoid this, you have a middleman, your own server. Your devices send their request to your server, which then securely uploads the data to Urban Airship.

So maybe a post launch update, overall its pretty lightweight server load wise. We just don't have the time to setup our own server at the moment.