Sprint 9 – Now In Technicolor

Hello girls and boys! It’s me! yo friendly neighbourhood James!

We’re going to do things a little differently this update. It felt a bit weird that everyone on the BETA were getting the updates a week after I share it everywhere else on Social media.

So starting this week, beta’s come first!

If you’re on the beta list or support me through patreon you will get access to the update first, then a week later everyone else will 🙂

Now! on to the updates!

Game Night Intro Video

To get some consistent branding on our videos I decided I should make an intro video, it’s only 11 seconds long and I will probably tweak it as time goes on but I’m pretty happy with the result at the moment.

Let me know what you think!

Game Night Video

Leading on from the Intro video, I made the game night video!

Actually replaying the footage and working out what works and what doesn’t takes the most amount of time here, so I cheated a little bit!

Firstly, I got an editor on Fivver to go through and cut out the parts they thought were funny and add some basic edits.

Then I took that footage, padded it out, added some memes, cool effects, a bit of music and boom! We’ve got a video.

You can check it out below, please also subscribe to our youtube channel – it would help a lot!

Chat Server

I’ve mostly run out of time, but towards the end of this sprint i’ve been working on refactoring the chat server now we have other services being launched.

This is to integrate it with the authentication service so that when you only have to login once for other services to recognize you.

Authentication will happen in two forms

When you login, the auth server will talk to the children services and tell them you’re an acceptable human being
On connect, your app / browser will send a secure token to the server which it then encrypts with a shared secret and sends to the authentication server for validation.

You can see an initial map of how that’s working with the chat server, it’s still not finished so i’ll continue this into next sprint 🙂

Sexy flow chart for sexy people — I swear if you’re technical this makes sense.

App Updates

Forgotten Password

Firstly, the forgotten password screens got a big ole clean up behind the scenes.

Sometimes I wonder if i'm even human — A brief glimpse into my madness

You can see the full commit here: https://github.com/SoSa-Community/app/commit/c4374fe2d1995d25e6731f2ce054608f219a14ba

Also after a lot of thinking, I decided the 2nd password field was a bit redundant so I removed it!

Making this screenshot reminded me why i hate Gimp!

UI Clean up

Next, I did a bunch of simple quality of life clean-ups in the chat area. These don’t sound like a lot of work but it’s these small refinements that help me get closer to the final product, little changes and updates every sprint will have a huge impact in the long run.

Changing the button to an icon makes me feel much happier

The send button is now an icon and i’ve added a little bit of padding around both the button and the text field.

Now I can log out of my self created abomination — Finally I can log out of my self created abomination

I’ve also added a logout button and the app removes the list of rooms when you get disconnected (fixing a bug with the disconnection mechanism)

Only a minor change but feels much more natural

Last but not least, I moved the online list into a slide out menu. It’s not pretty but much more functional than a popup and more in line with people’s expectations of user lists.

Game Night

Next SoSa game night we will be playing Team Fortress 2

Sunday 17th May 1900-2100 GMT / 1200-1400 PT / 1500-1700 ET

Time to teach those naughty robots who’s boss, join us in our fight against this hive of scum and villainy in this free multiplayer FPS.

Nothing to buy this time, just download and install! You can get on Steam here

Make sure you get a ticket on Event Brite so we know you’re coming

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/sosa-plays-team-fortress-2-tickets-104327759136

Stats

You love your stats don’t you? Well here you go nerd!

Beta list is now at 285, we had a few spammy additions so i’ve removed those.

Unique Visitors are up this sprint from 9,898 last sprint to 12,130

Our Average position has increased slightly but also our clicks and impressions have dropped slightly.

We gained a single follower on insta! (thank you :))

And finally, Facebook reach is almost back to normal!

That’s it for this sprint folks! I hope you’re enjoying my updates and keeping safe!

~James

Sprint 9 – Now In Technicolor