Past Entries...

100 posts since April, 2016!
posted this in: Gaming, Software, Technology
614 Words

eLeague.gg is rapidly growing behind the scenes, and this is especially true in regards to the tech development team behind the scenes.

Our current development team consists entirely of one person (yours truly) and my duties involve:

  • Coding behind all the site’s actions (more on this later)
  • Designing everything visitors see on the site
  • Writing all the content on the site
  • Designing the structure of the site, processes and user flow

Not to mention all the maintenance involved…! So the obvious solution, is to bring on board more people! The exceptionally talented1 :

  • PSmith a long time LAN party regular at my events and volunteer admin both at my events, and at PAX Australia
  • SirSquidness the well known server/network/LAN guy from Respawn LAN, Melbourne (also same for PAX Aus PC Area)

So…. What’s the problem?

Well, since I started out running LAN parties, and doing gaming events – all my sites have always been bespoke, from the ground up creations. All involving myself as the sole designer, and sole developer. I’ve never had to answer to anyone and in fact, never had to consider that someone else might come in and develop on my sites/projects. Again, this is certainly horrible practice and not something any developer should really do.

And so again, as eLeague.gg started up – guess what I did? Haha…

And now? What is the solution?

Git branches. I already develop everything and store it through a personal Git repository system (I use Phabricator for my Git repo management needs).

As it currently stands, I keep:

  • A branch called staging: this is for testing, development and experimental content creation.
  • A branch called production: this is for everything that is on the live eLeague.gg website.

While this stops me from accidentally implementing broken features (sort of) it’s still not ideal for three developers working all at once on eLeague.gg’s core code. So we’ve developed a way to organise ourselves in such a way that each developer is independent, but bases their code off a singular source of truth.

This looks like:

file

What’s more important is the flow of code as signified by the arrowheads in the diagram above. Developers should in theory, only ever be pulling and pushing features in both directions from the Dev(elopment) Branch. And all features should be internally vetted within the Tech Team before being pushed to the Pre(flight) Branch, and then onto the Production Branch if all goes well with the rest of the team.

Some caveats:

  • No more than a single developer should be working on a single feature at a time. If multiple developers are needed, then one dev needs to stop working on said feature, before another dev takes over.
  • There is a degree of potential data and code entropy over time between all three branches – dev, pre and produciton. As such, only JT (me) will have access to being able to merge ‘backwards’ from Production > Pre > Dev.
  • Setting up for three developers simultaneously also means we now have a bigger delay in rolling out features as everything needs to now be spec’d, documented and planned out.

I suppose it’s a great little situation to be in that I can start working on eLeague.gg in earnest with a team, and now I should hopefully be able to focus more on not just the technical development of eLeague.gg, but the rest of it too!


1: This list of people does not use names they uses their drivers’ licenses. Our team has many people with the same given names so to help differentiate, we refer to each other by our gamer nicknames.

posted this in: Events, Gaming
243 Words

Hello.

For the past half decade I’ve burned through my financial resources, time, energy and even health working towards running and building a gaming community. Learning scraps of everything I needed to get by on and then having to relearn things to master them. It’s been one heck of a journey.

This blog is my personal thoughts and feelings only as I build my gaming community; and it’s my way of recording this great adventure.

On March 19th this year, I managed to execute the first BYOC event of our gaming community brand, eLeague.gg – we had spent the past 5 years as Multiplayer United (and still continue to use this name to help other communities) but it came to a head with this new brand, and this new concept.

eSports Gamers

Community Gamers

Quirky Competitions

Incredible Modders

Loads of swag and prizes

It all came together; and as we near the approach of our next event – we face more challenges. Fixing the (hopefully mostly unnoticed) mistakes of the first event, improving our event’s features, and on a personal level of obsession that’s now infamous on our team – our online platform to support the burgeoning community.

As this blog continues, I hope you guys will enjoy the insight, efforts and lengths which the talented people I’m blessed to both work with and call my friends at eLeague.gg go to, in order to deliver an amazing gaming experience in Sydney, Australia.

posted this in: Gaming
575 Words

One of the big gripes I have about my current to-do list with eLeague.gg is that I’m almost buried in the work required for developing the website. It actually genuinely gets in the way of something that I think might be even more important to eLeague’s operations — communicating with the community.

We haven’t quite explained it clearly although people can probably guess from our event naming that eLeague.gg operates on a seasonal calendar – with our BYOC acting as the ‘launch’ event of the season. Contrary to popular belief, these events are not our grand finals although they do host them, for example:

  • Autumn BYOC – hosts Summer Finals, launches Autumn
  • Winter BYOC – hosts Autumn Finals, launches Winter
  • Spring BYOC – hosts Winter Finals, launches Spring
  • Summer BYOC – hosts Spring Finals, launches Summer

With such frequent, eSport level events; there’s a lot to learn that some existing market players already know very well. Even though eLeague.gg’s focus is not on top tier teams; a lot of what we’re learning I can only imagine that the premium tournament organisers have had to go through many moons ago.

Coming from a strictly community BYOC background – means I’ve had to learn (and am still learning) the pressures of organising a consistent, regular tournaments with our community.

This includes bringing on specialist members into our team who are knowledgeable about games. Let’s use Counter-Strike: Global Offensive as an example as it’s our most popular title (currently).

file

I’ve been playing Counter-Strike a long time. In fact, I was there at release day of beta 1 some time in 1999 (I was in year 9 at high school at the time and had little else to do but play games). However, the times they are a-changing. I’ve been playing CS:GO but only occasionally, and my reflexes aren’t as fast anymore. The community’s attitudes have changed. The concept of eSports as a serious venture is now much closer than the distant dream on the horizon it was when I started doing LAN gaming.

We’ve brought on two very young members on our team, they’ve got the energy and drive to help eLeague.gg truly deliver an amazing experience for Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. The sensationally talented:

  • FISHY well known for his contributions to LAN based tournaments at Respawn in Melbourne
  • Karath a well known member of the Australian CS:GO community, he’s in fact already smoothly run our first tournament at our Autumn BYOC

And with them, a whole swathe of volunteers who are passionate about CS:GO and the gaming community to support them.

They’ve been working to develop rule sets for us, and to try and implement our first seasonal tournament that we shall be announcing over the next 48 hours! And I hope the community will, on some level, understand the stresses they had setting up a great looking tournament, while struggling with an online platform that’s literally in the flux of development and constantly changing around their organisation.

It’s been a team effort between the tech team, our CS:GO team and even our other game organisers coming up, to get things running.

There’s a great journey ahead for eLeague.gg as it continues to deliver ever evolving resources to support the community. And I’m glad that there’s a team that’s so supportive, passionate and ingenius; and a community that’s incredibly supportive, understanding and passionate – about the games we play.