Well, it took me, uh, 352 days from September 4, 2018, to August 22, 2019, to complete the 100daysofcode challenge, but I did it. 100 days where I worked on my game. Granted, nowhere near the 100 days in a row, but it was really useful to keep logging things and keep track of what I was doing and where I was going. Plus, reading about my failures and/or challenges now is just funny.
This log entry might be one of my favourites. I am so frustrated, you can practically hear the fatigue in my text.
Anyway, in my last blog post, I figured 62ish hours of work to get things done for Labour Day. Well, my alpha launched at 2am the morning after Labour Day (so close enough), and it was close to 130 hours of work, from June 30-September 2. Note to self: double all estimated hours going forward.
Throughout the last year and more, I have learned a great deal about PHP, MySQL, Amazon Web Services, Docker, Composer, sessions, CSVs, importing CSVs, SSL certificates… A lot of stuff. And now that the game is launched, the adventure is kind of only starting. I’m going to have data! Actual, real, user data!
I also desperately need a LOT more questions, so that’ll be my focus for the next couple of weeks. Why do I need a LOT more questions? Well, the game is currently, shall we say, heavily weighted towards the nerds and geeks of the world. There are 300 Star Trek questions. 100 Red Dwarf questions. Over 100 Doctor Who questions. 100 Back to the Future questions. It’s, uh, not great for a well-rounded trivia experience, so when I looked at the real-time “Correctly-answered questions percentage” at some point today, it was 38%! Like, what?!? Sure, even I don’t get 100%, but I get in the mid-70s, typically. Granted, I wrote the vast majority of the questions, so I do have an unfair advantage, but even taking that into consideration, I thought for sure we’d be looking at closer to 50%.
Well, my dad signed up and played and, because we have a small sample size and because it seems he got a bunch about the periodic table, he brought the overall correct question percentage up to 42% and change. But, the wonderful thing is that I can call up all these stats and find out which questions are hard. Or too hard. Or too easy. Like, okay, I have a question about a hockey player named Blake Geoffrion, who’s descended from not one, but two famous Montreal Canadiens players. Sure. That’s hard. I don’t expect a lot of people to get that.
Should a non-Canadian know the capital of our Nunavut territory? Well, probably not.
But you’d think most people would know Brandon Routh played Superman in Superman Returns, no? Well, still very geeky, I guess.
Anyway, I’m watching the data and will be writing many more questions that are less nerdy in scope. The goal is to get like 5-6000 questions total for the main launch. Then the Star Trek questions would only be five percent of the total questions instead of a whopping 25% or so right now.
That said, props to whoever knew Deanna Troi’s mother’s name, whoever knew who played the Seventh Doctor and whoever knew what game Queeg challenged Holly to play!
All right. Bedtime now. Go play my game!