Refactoring life

maxistentialist:

After about two years of design, development, and testing, we have launched version 1.0 of the new HvZ SOURCE software.

HvZ SOURCE is the game hosting software that helps players organize Humans vs. Zombies on six continents.

To arrive at the final design for the new SOURCE, we interviewed dozens of Humans vs. Zombies moderators from around world to learn how they have customized their games. To add the functionality we needed, it was necessary to rewrite the software from the ground up.

This release was built primarily by Ben Beecher and myself. This is the most complicated and best thing that either of us has ever made, and we both had to learn a tremendous amount to get it done. Ben had to learn about web typography, CSS layouts, and usability standards. I had to learn how to use Git, jQueryUI, the Django template language, and enough Python to connect the game logic to our front end. To complicate matters, we did all of this remotely, while we worked full-time jobs.

We also couldn’t afford any critical errors or scaling issues - we knew that we would have to support a lot of users right away (we launched with 3,000 players in 71 games and are expanding rapidly) - and if our software failed, it would compromise games.

Ben and I are constantly pushing each other to learn new things and make our work more perfect. I call Ben all the time to tell him to move something over 1px (“Dude, are you kidding me with the pixel?”) and Ben always demands that I use as few lines of code as possible and abstract every UI element to avoid redundancy.

I love this software and I’m really excited to see it used for this game season. Check it out.

It’s been so fun to make this, I wouldn’t have had it any other way.