Updating a live game

One of the problems I have had to wrestle, and I am still wrestling with it, is changing the layouts, making the scripts more standards compliant, is doing so without breaking the game while people are playing.

Its difficult. Any change brings in a response, good or bad. The current Kingdom of Riches layout is about 12 months old so it does need a change, but I also have a lot of game play changes. Lots of layout changes, but more importantly to me and the staff of the game is the coding changes in the background that the players never see.

I want to make it easier to add new things, at the moment, the code is crap. No other word for it. Its had 2 years of adding new functionality to it without any real structural control. The new code is more efficient, profiled and will be 100% xhtml standards compliant.

Over the next few months, and it will take months, as I will be adding stuff to the live game slowly, and making sure it does not break everything else. The layouts will change on the pages, hopefully the changes will make the game easier to play, and easier to add new cool features.

I'm hoping to make good use of the tabs rather than having all those menu's everywhere. Also the tabs will allow me to use the whole screen rather than losing part of the screen to a menu. Also means I can have different types of page in places to add a bit more variety.

We will have to see how it goes.