It’s been a busy few days here at Streaming Colour.

This morning I finally got my source control repository backed up off-site. This is good news because now if my server goes up in smoke (including both redundant disks), my source tree still exists somewhere else. This should stop me from losing all of my work to date [knocks on wood].

Let me tell you what a pain this was to set up. It would have been much easier if I hadn’t cared about making sure the connection between the two servers was secure and that all the data was encrypted when being sent between the two…you know…little things. Luckily a friend of mine is a bit of a security/unix wiz and was able to help me get everything set up. He also gave me some space on his server to actually load my backup on to, so thanks!

When I haven’t been worrying about ssh tunnels I’ve been continuing to make improvement to the prototype. I’ve got two special items into the game now, which really helps with fun and playability at later levels. So, once again, I’m convinced that my end condition will work because the special items lend a lot more strategy to the game. The user feels like they have more control over the outcome of the game. I know I keep coming back to this same point, but it’s very important to the feel of the game. If there’s no challenge, why bother playing at all. If there’s no way to improve and get further in the game, why bother playing at all. It’s a tricky balance.

With regard to the business side of things, I’ve spent a lot of time over the last week dealing with PST issues. I’m not selling any products yet, but I will, and I need to figure out which provinces I need to charge PST on products vs HST vs no PST (Alberta, I’m looking at you). This has meant spending a lot of time on phone calls with various provinces’ tax departments trying to verify that what I produce is, indeed, taxable. Don’t get me started on whether or not doing contract programming work is a taxable service. Each province seems to have a different answer. Good times.

Owen

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 22nd, 2008 at 11:45 am and is filed under Business, Design, Technical. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.