Good day everyone! Sorry for being a day late on this. I was away from my computer for most of yesterday and by the time I got back it was way to late to post anything. That being said I am very happy to post the 3rd and final update where we go over some of our plans and updates on the main site!
General Update & Status
So as some of you may know we have been working quite hard on an itch.io like site that we have been calling the “Main Site” that can be used to host and search for games much easier then here on the forums. For those of you who may have not seen some of our screen shots on twitter here is a few screen shots of our alpha from one of our dev builds to give you all an idea of how it is looking.
Right now I am working hard on getting the project page and upload system finished up. After that we just need to secure down the endpoints, make some adjustments to the real time search, add some hooks for keep track of statics that devs may want, and prep AWS for deployment.
While I have been hesitant to state any hard dates, I am very happy with the progress thus far and the system architecture we now have in place. Barring anything major causing major disruptions I feel its safe to say we are aiming to have an alpha out by the end of this year!
Alpha Features
Here is a small list of some of the features we have planned for initial release and that will be added to the alpha a bit latter. This is not an extensive list but should give a bit of a clear idea on what we are working on.
Initial Release
- Supported Game Types
- Application
- Web Application (JS/HTML5)
- External Web Application
- Real Time Search/Filtering
- Basic Access Control Lists
- Branches (Dev/Testing/Release)
- Changelogs
- Screen Shots
- Video Embeds
Later Releases
- Default Filtering Preferences/Search Customization
- Patreon Support
- Advanced Access Control Lists
- User ID Tokens for Web and External Web Apps to use to authenticate users on the site
- Groups
- Dev Blogs
Who will get Access
Everyone, for the most part, but we are going to be limiting the devs that can upload to the main site to help us keep the costs controlled so we do not collapse under a sudden cost increase and to help us ensure the stability of the site as we slowly open it up. In general access to devs will be given in 3 phases:
Phase 1 - Initial Release
During initial release access to uploading projects will only be given to a small handful of devs and will be invite only and will mainly be looking for devs that will also work with us to help us test the site. We plan the initial group to be around 5 at first, then expanding it to 10 soon after that. We may grant access to more or less devs depending on how it goes.
Phase 2 - Limited Public Opening
During this phase we will be allowing devs to apply for upload access to the main site. We will put out a google forum for devs to use to apply and we will grant access based on what the project is and how we feel the system is currently handling the load/cost. At this point users should expect to see the home page of the site change form the forums to the main site.
Phase 3 - Full Public Opening
As it says on the tin, full public opening. All users will be able to create and upload projects to the main site. That all being said if we see a really large spike in costs or the site seems to be having some issues we may have to roll back to phase 2 until we can get them sorted.
Increase in Operating Costs
Now while we are excited to finally be getting close to releasing, we are not excited to see how our operating costs are going to increase. We expected our current costs to increase between $300-$500 a month. Luckily, between ad sense and our wonderful patreons, we should be able to take the initial hit fine.
That being said we do not know for sure how much costs are going to go up especially since bandwidth costs are really difficult to accurately estimate and our ad-sense may take a bit of a hit if we do not have it integrated into the main site by the time we move onto phase 2. Due to that I am going to plug our patreon here incase anyone wants to help out:
All in all I think that is most of everything from our meeting. If anyone has any questions or would like to know more feel free to ask below!