03/09/2017: Dev Update
In the interest of making our communication a little more accessible, we have decided to separate our dev updates from our other content (big thanks to some of the supportive members of our slack community for the suggestion). These updates might be a little less frequent every couple of weeks to a month and to many they might simply sound like “hey we’re coding”. But we will make a good effort to keep you informed of what we are working on in our current sprint without giving away any of our secret sauce before it’s ready for primetime.
Matchmaking
Our solo & party queues are powered by a sophisticated matchmaking engine. We’re done with the initial design and mockups for matchmaking, so our task now will be integrating the front and backend that will bring our matchmaking engine to life.
User Profiles
They are a feature that is often glossed over, but the way we set up user profiles will have a far-reaching impact on how the rest of the platform looks and feels. We have our initial specifications for user profiles done and are now working on mockups. From a design point of view, there is an interesting dichotomy between displaying relevant information and keeping user profiles both free of clutter and aesthetically pleasing; contrast a how crazy and cluttered myspace profiles used to be with the simplicity of a twitter profile. We think we have found a happy middle ground that will allow users to show off their own personality and display any relevant information, without having profiles become hulking unnavigable behemoths.
Friends & Chat
By its nature, FirstBlood will be a social app. So having the ability to curate a friends list, along with creating a party of friends to play with or even a predefined team is going to be an integral part of the system. Our dev team is currently implementing the backend of the friends system and will move on to implementing the backend for the chat features next.
Infrastructure deployment
As we scale, there will be a pretty significant infrastructure load that will need to be carefully considered. Zack is currently exploring and refining how we will roll out our server infrastructure, including load balancing, CDNs, and DDoS mitigation.
