If I didn’t laugh, I’d cry

Filed under Design Diary on November 13, 2007
Keywords: Eternal Warlords

The issues with our server appear to be resolved. Chris wiped the hard drives and will complete the reinstall by this Friday. He’ll spend the weekend running some tests to make sure all the services are working, but the prognosis is good based on some discoveries he made during the setup process this time around.

Unfortunately, the pattern of clearing one obstacle only to encounter another continues. Aaron, my other partner and the web developer who was to be building the e-commerce portal for the game, has had to back out of the project completely for personal reasons. I totally understand, and harbor no ill will, but it’s still frustrating.

Chris and I discussed options, and our preference is to go with a pre-packaged solution that uses PHP and MySQL, as that is the technology that the game uses and that we are most familiar with. The second option is for he and I to cobble something together. HTML and CSS are no problem for me, but my database programming skills are limited and I’m just familiar enough with PHP that I can read someone else’s code and make tweaks. Chris’s strength is database programming.

The downside of this choice is the amount of time it would probably take. We hit the one-year mark in the development cycle last month, and the company is now bleeding money on a monthly basis. We need to start generating income soon.

I could probably squeeze some money out of the budget to hire a contractor, but I’d really rather not. We have a small cushion now, and I’d like to keep that. The benefit of this route is that a contractor could bang out a solution in a couple days.

The last option, and the least preferred, is to switch to .Net. The .Net platform is very popular, and fully supported by the Suse (the OS we’re running), so we would have a wider pool of developers to chose from. In fact, I have a friend who is a .Net developer. However, we would then be supporting multiple technologies for this product, and that is not something I’m in favor of, especially when neither Chris or I have any familiarity with .Net.

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