(whining begins)

I’ve been a software developer for over 15 years and for the most part, I’ve enjoyed it.  But this past month has been sheer agony. 

Spending immense amounts of time at work away from my little boys and my daughter and my wonderful wife has been taking its toll and I feel so helpless because my development area isn’t in the area that my teams are focused on – networking.

My friends at Gas Powered Games, even right now, are working the midnight oil to do their best with Demigod and similarly, my friends and coworkers here at Stardock are outside my office working diligently on the same kinds of things.

It’s so frustrating because where I come from in normal game development, your code either works or it doesn’t. If it doesn’t, it’s a “bug” and you fix it. You make sure you don’t have any show stopper bugs before you ship a game.

But with Demigod, the complexities of a vast matchmaking system is just a huge pain. Besides sheer compatibility nonsense to deal with (Europe with their VDSL and the US with ISPs sometimes blocking P2P traffic) you also have systems that are brand new that work fine under a reasonable load but fall apart when there’s thousands of people hammering them at once.

I feel like I’ve let down our community and our fans. People know we are diligent about this kind of thing but this has been so heart breaking to watch. While I know that the team will get it fixed, the good will of players is finite.  Sure, it works for most people but that’s pathetic. It should work for basically anyone without a firewall.

It’s also putting a lot of stress on our teams, particularly the games team which I’ve had to put onto this project to help solve things faster. This isn’t game development, this is network administration. It’s just obnoxious.

The teams are working their hearts out both here and in Seattle (GPG) and progress is being made but what’s really depressing is seeing the check-in comments. They’re not fixing “bugs” they’re having to do new design for things that just didn’t scale well. 

There’s a reason why only a few companies have put together these kinds of systems, it’s a huge pain.  I am hoping they can nail this stuff down before the weekend.

Meanwhile, we have one of our distribution partners making threats because we won’t budge from our 1 price for 1 world model (i.e. Demigod costs the same in USA as it does anywhere else in the world).

(whining ends)

I just look forward to getting back to working on actual GAME development.