Hi Stakes Game is in Alpha now. The servers were deployed yesterday. I mostly just wanted to see the app on my phone working without being at home. I can be anywhere and continue to trade on the game.
Atlas Fury demonstrated a good lesson in deploying early as possible to keep the inertia going. I hadn't worked on Hi Stakes game in a while. I decided this week that i would deploy it along with upgrading operating systems on all of my servers including the one used to run this site. The fact the alpha production deploy went without a hitch only highlights the fact that my custom infrastructure is stable. Any problems resolved during the lab server deploy did not occur in production. This is consistently amazing. Just like the game though it is still rough around the edges. Unlike the game, will never be open source.
Anyway, just glad to see my work on both iPhone and Android that I can show to whoever I want and at some point get a beta version for testers to try it out. Ideally the game is slow at first just like any financial "game", but as you accumulate you can do more. Obviously, you can just buy content to jump start the fun. End goal of a 1.0 public version has a variety of assets that you can use to your advantage to accumulate and accumulate until you decide to try your luck at winning prizes.
I wish there was a better way to get the first users to feel like they can do things immediately and get that kick.
Anyway, context switch back to Atlas Fury and march to release!