Name change

So, I am officially updating the name of this project to Nutty Bolts (unless anyone has any last-minute brilliant ideas). I'll update the blog and my portfolio shortly with the new name.

I'm also working on updating the look and feel of the interface. At first, I was just going to apply a new color scheme (blue and orange) to the existing interface, make some minor updates based on the handy Web 2.0 style guide, and pretty much leave it at that. It was shiny and glossy and everything that a Web 2.0 site should be. But I also thought it was pretty boring and indistinct, so I decided to change it. After all, this isn't a new technology startup to help you be more productive - it's a game, and a game based on absurdity and unpredictability on top of that! Looking boring indistinct is pretty much a death sentence for the atmosphere that I think the game should set.

So, I decided to take a looser approach to the style guidelines, rather than treating its recommendations as holy writ. I think there's a lot of things that make sense for my project - the design is going to be relatively clean so it's easy for newcomers to get an idea of what it's all about, and it's going to have strong, bold colors to make its branding clear. But, there will be no precious rounded corners or gradients. The icons and headers will not have a smooth, glassy sheen that you can practically see yourself in. I started with a logotype font with lots of irregular angles and flat surfaces, like a bunch of wood planks nailed (or bolted!) together, and I went from there. Overall, my goal is to make the type of interface that Apple will run screaming from.

Yes, I know that this will certainly take a while, and I'm kind of afraid of proving the adage "The perfect is the enemy of the good." This is already my third full iteration of the site design, and it hasn't even gone live yet! Additionally, the irregularity of the design may make it difficult to code in HTML. But I think it'll be worth it in the end.

Legality update

So the other day I met with an intellectual property lawyer through my entrepreneurship class, and I discussed the legality of Dangerous Apples with her. Although it was pretty brief, I think I was satisfied by the answers. The good news is that the basic idea of Apples to Apples is not copyrightable, meaning that no gameplay changes are required for my version. The bad news is that the branding must be different enough to make it clear that it's not Apples to Apples. So I'd really prefer to get away from both a name involving "Apples" and the red-and-green color scheme. Guess it's time to go digging back into those suggestions I had gotten before.

Game Mechanics

Recently, I've been thinking about slightly changing the game mechanics for Dangerous Apples. This is largely in light of the situation involving Scrab...uh, Wordscraper, which recently re-launched with some significant gameplay changes to avoid copyright infringement. I can't help but wonder if Dangerous Apples will encounter a similar situation. Thus, I'm considering what types of rule changes could be made.

To start, let's take a step back and examine why Apples to Apples (the original) is so much fun. I think there are two main factors. The first is the sheer absurdity of the decisions that the game forces you to make. Many of the cards are intrinsically funny, but the juxtaposition of cards in ways that are unexpected but still make sense makes it even better. Are pirates more casual than Yankee Stadium? Which one out of Al Gore, San Francisco, and a dozen roses is the most tolerant? Is the concept of Hannibal Lecter being described as "cuddly" funny enough that you would choose him over bunny rabbits? There is no correct answer for any of these; in fact, there's not even a framework for you to evaluate these questions. Instead, you get to fill in whatever logic (or lack thereof) you want. The second factor is directly related to this; it's very helpful to know the other players well enough to guess what they are likely to enjoy and choose. The social component is what makes it such a great party game. So I think it's essential that whatever Dangerous Apples turns out to be, it must have these two elements.

In my opinion, the key to making Dangerous Apples better is to leverage the advantages that a web-based game can have over playing the same game in person. Ideally, Dangerous Apples should let players do something that Apples to Apples cannot do. Here are the advantages that I can think of:

• Freedom from physical constraints. Web games can do things that aren't strictly limited to the equipment that you can fit in a box. An example of this is how Wordscraper now allows you to play on a board with a randomized layout - you sure can't do that with your Scrabble board! In this case, unfortunately, there's not much that I can do, considering that all that comes in the Apples to Apples box is a whole bunch of noun cards and adjective cards. There's really not a heck of a lot that you can't do with that. However, there's basically no limit to the number of cards I can put into my database, as opposed to having to deal with thousands of actual physical cards. I can also provide a wild card that the player can fill out with something different every time he plays it. While this is not impossible with Apples to Apples' wild cards, it's unlikely and impractical. Or, cards could be dynamically generated, perhaps referring to randomly selected players.
  
• Perfect information management. This is admittedly a vague term, but what I mean is that a computer will always keep track of storing, calculating, displaying, and hiding the game information as necessary. (On a side note, this is why I'd like to see a computer-moderated version of Mafia, since players never have to worry about the moderator forgetting the assigned roles or game mechanics, or a role being revealed inadvertently.) I'm already leveraging this by showing exactly who played which card after the judge votes, which is something that rarely happens in Apples to Apples. Beyond that, most of the information management in Apples to Apples is pretty simple - cards are dealt randomly, then kept hidden in the players' hands, and players' identities are kept secret until the judge votes. The original game takes care of this very well.
• Connecting people. This is where I think the biggest advantages for Dangerous Apples are, even if the rules stay the same. It's tough to get more than 10 people together in a single room at once, but it's much easier over the Internet. In fact, Dangerous Apples can allow for games with way more players than Apples to Apples can, although I don't think that a game with 100 players would be as much fun.

So based on these ideas, I'm considering a few changes or variations in the rules. It could be that instead of a judge picking the answer, all players rank each card on a scale from 1 to 5, and the card with the highest score wins. It could be that there is no deck of red cards at all; instead, players must choose a noun by starting from a randomly selected page on Wikipedia and browsing through the links on that page. It could be that all players are shown the same list of red cards, and you receive points for choosing the same cards as the judge. I'm not sure I like these ideas better than the original game, but they're starting points.

Any thoughts?

Dangerous Apples needs your help!

One of the many things on my checklist for completing Dangerous Apples is to refine the list of green cards and red cards. This is the kind of task that really benefits from audience input, so I'd like your help in deciding what the new list of cards should be! I am opening up the floor for suggestions, both for potential nouns and potential adjectives. If there's a noun or adjective that you'd love to see in Dangerous Apples, bring it out there! I will consider anything and everything. Keep in mind that the game is primarily aimed at the Web 2.0 crowd, and that since I'm just stuffing things in the database, I'd like to err on the side of having too many cards rather than too few. If you'd like to see the list of cards that are currently in the database and my initial thoughts on them, you can check out the green cards and the red cards (both in XLS format).

Thanks in advance!

Bug fix report

So the issues that cropped up in the most recent test have basically all been resolved at this point. I finally figured out why the scores and judge order were getting out of whack - basically when two or more cards were submitted simultaneously (or within the two-second window that I use), it would cause the judge order to jump ahead that many times. Also amusing was why it didn't work in IE. Apparently, disabling the submit button, which I do to avoid repeat submits, actually disables form submission altogether.

Now - who wants to do more testing? :)

Another user test!

I just got back from a test with real, actual, live users, and overall, things went pretty well. I introduced a completely new set of people to the game, including my first remote user. Overall, people liked it a lot, but as usual, there were some issues that cropped up, which isn't surprising considering that I totally gutted the application's code since the last time I tested:

-First, it appears that I have lost the game of Web Browser Bingo that any web app must play. The "join game" screen was completely non-functional in IE 7, and one user was forced to download Firefox. As much as people should be using Firefox anyway, it's not really Dangerous Apples' place to force that decision on them.
-Some players did not receive a hand of cards when the game page first loaded, but received them upon a page refresh. I'm setting the "game has started" flag before the cards are dealt, so it's probably related to that.
-Occasionally, the function to reward the winner with an extra point and move onto the next judge was called multiple times, resulting in inaccurate scores and worse, an inconsistent judge status. This was also fixed by a refresh, but I'm not sure why it's happening.
-Some red cards came up multiple times in a game. This might be a race condition issue.
-It was a bit confusing to tell who had won the previous round. To fix this, I will restore the "Last round's winner" display, as well as highlight the winning card, both of which were missing.
-The game should be less formalized - people should be allowed to join and leave during the middle of a game (which might be an issue to decide where in the judge order they should go). Additionally, given that we got to round 34 out of 20, you should be allowed to play as many rounds as you want.
-Other than that, the main issues were just in terms of layout and making sure people know where everything is. And grammar fixes.

So I'd like to say thanks to all my testers (both in this session and in past sessions), and if I missed anything else, feel free to post it!

Anyone home?

Wow, I have a blog here! *brushes Internet dust off* Apparently I haven't updated this blog in quite a while - largely because I haven't updated Dangerous Apples in quite a while. The end of grad school was quite a turbulent one, and the project time that I did have was largely devoted to Blue Shift Hockey Charts instead. But I'm back, and even though I have a full-time summer internship, I'm going to try to find some time for getting DA finished.

So, just a little status update from where we last left off. I had a successful and favorable user test of DA back in March. I was even able to test it out on an entirely new user, who was able to pick up the interface without any questions whatsoever. That's a good sign! However, one user accidentally joined the room twice, which would have ruined the game irreparably had it not been for my intervention. This represents the type of issues that I feel I need to resolve before DA is ready for prime-time - the overall workflow is in place, but I need to make sure it handles errors such as this gracefully. It's not fun work, but it's certainly more fun than having your game explode on you.

In the meantime, I've started re-doing some of the client-side code, which was getting kind of ugly. I've installed jQuery and am in the process of re-writing my JavaScript code to use it. I wish I had known about it before I started writing A2A, it would've saved me a lot of time. But it'll allow me to add more nifty features (dragging cards to the table, anyone?) in the future. I think I will also have to replace the numerous layout tables with div tags, because it's just a huge problem.

Also, I did have another feature idea for the future. I'm largely designing DA around the idea that it'll be played by people who already know each other. This is why I haven't implemented a formal user account system like a lot of other game sites. With this in mind, I think it does make sense to set up something like a Facebook application where you can create a DA game and invite your friends. Besides Facebook, any suggestions for other social systems that I can exploit?

Finally, just as a general rant about the lengths that web development takes you to. IE 6 (and apparently 5.5) has a rendering bug in which dropdown menus (implemented by the select tag) will always appear "above" everything else on your page, even if you don't want them to. This was a problem for the index page, which features a dropdown menu showing all of the current games and a dialog box that lets you create a new game. Sure enough, the dropdown obscures the dialog box. Apparently, there is a fix for this involving an iframe, but I wasn't sure how to implement it on a draggable dialog box. I also didn't like the fact that dropdowns can't be styled, and that it wasn't fading out with the rest of the page when the dialog was summoned. So I actually wound up implementing my own dropdown menu that doesn't have these problems. Surprisingly, it wasn't that much more of a pain, but the whole principle of what I had to do just makes me shake my head in amazement.

Hopefully, that'll hold you guys until my next update, which I promise won't be as long in the making!

Hosting!

Sorry for the lack of updates recently, grad school intervenes. Anyway, this is a momentous day in the history of Dangerous Apples - it is now hosted! This means that beta testing can continue. Please let me know if you're interested in helping out and I'll give you the URL (preference given to local people, just out of convenience to me).

Stylized Card

I just had an interesting new thought about Dangerous Apples' graphic design. For one of my school assignments, I am using DA's card background graphic in an Adobe Illustrator file. I had to convert this graphic, which is raster-based, into a vector-based format so Illustrator could rotate it. At one point during the conversion, I accidentally left the number of colors to use at 6 instead of using the maximum 256 colors. It sounds like it could've been a disaster, but I actually really liked the results.

For the purpose of comparison, here's the original graphic that I drew next to the graphic that Illustrator produced:



I really like the second one. It just seems to be a lot more organic. It has a lot of subtle variations and assymetries in the thickness and shape of lines, and even the placement of elements. The shadow and highlight on the apple look really great too. Even though it's a lot fewer colors, it looks really good and stylized that way. I think it fits the theme of the game as a fun, almost cartoony diversion. I'd love to see the card logo animated too, maybe the stem does a little dance and the highlight bounces up and down in rhythm.

Now I'm not about to go changing the page design again. I've already given it one facelift before it was even finished, and I plan on leaving it at that. But it's something to think about for the future. I also have to say that as great as this looks, it's not good for my ego that I just got out-arted by a piece of software, despite how much time and effort I put into my own attempt. (However, it could be argued that the software itself did nothing, it was only guided by my skillful and judicious hand. I'm going to take that interpretation and run with it.)

Apples on Apples

The other day I was able to get Dangerous Apples working perfectly on Mac OS X (with Firefox, naturally). This is important, because a lot of people around here have Macs and I have a feeling that a lot of my testing is going to have to be on a Mac. I also finally fixed up IE 6 and its PNG display issues, so that basically just leaves IE 7 as the last platform I'd like to support, and that seemed OK too once I figured out that it doesn't like port numbers (which is unfathomable to me, but that's neither here nor there). I'll have to test more though.

More to come later! This is a very exciting time in the development process.