Minigame idea

I had an interesting idea for a minigame to include. Basically, it'd be like a solo version of Apples to Apples - you'd be dealt a random hand of red cards, and you'd pick the red card that went the best with a randomly selected green card. The judge would be taken entirely out of the game, so there wouldn't be any judging whether or not you picked the "right" one. It'd just be an opportunity to make funny connections without having to gather enough people together to play a real game.

Of course, there is a darker, more sinister purpose to the minigame behind its shiny exterior. When someone plays a round of the minigame, I record those results to fuel a useful service to the real game. Basically, it'd be popularity rankings on the red cards. So if you're playing a game and you're not sure which red card to play, you can ask the server which red cards are most popular based on the results of the minigame and the real game, both overall and in terms of the current green card. It's all about social computing and collective wisdom and Web 2.0 and other such things!

Any thoughts? Maybe this could be the basis of the Facebook app that someone keeps bugging me about (you know who you are :D).

New Design

I've updated the blog's page design, as you can see. I was going to try making a design on my own, but I poked through Blogger's list of templates a little more closely and I found this design, which I really like. It's not exactly what I had in mind, but I think it's pretty snazzy looking. Besides which, in order to make my own design, I would've had to:

1. Research other blogs and sites to help me refine my ideas
2. Mock up the design as an image in The GIMP
3. Extract all the graphics I'd need, and upload them somewhere
   
4. Create an HTML mockup for the blog
5. Import the HTML into Blogger's templates

That's easily at least a few days' work, especially once I have to start working it in around my other commitments. I'd say this design is certainly better than anything I could've come up with in a reasonable time frame. Sure saves me a lot of work.

What's in a name?

I'm back! Sorry for the lack of recent updates, but real life intervenes. Anyway, this post is dedicated to what this project will actually be called. Right now, I'm using "Apples to AJAX" just about everywhere, but I have to say that I don't particularly like that name. For one thing, I think it's a little bit too close to the original "Apples to Apples", and I don't really feel like risking legal trouble. My understanding is that I'll be OK just as long as I don't use the exact name or a very obvious derivation thereof (definitely correct me if I'm mistaken on that), but I'd really like not to push it.

Additionally, I don't like the fact that it has "AJAX" in it. Granted, the game is going to feature AJAX very prominently, but I don't think it's important for my future visitors to know that. When you boil it down, "AJAX" is basically just a web development buzzword that doesn't have a whole lot of meaning to the end user. A lot of people don't know what it is, so I would have to answer "what the heck is AJAX?" from the majority of people who visit the site. I don't think I could even explain it succinctly to someone who doesn't know a lot about how the Internet works, which is likely to be most of my audience. And that's kind of the point - even if you don't have the slightest idea what AJAX is, you can still play the game perfectly fine. So basically, there's absolutely no reason for the word "AJAX" to appear in the name.

Just as an aside though, I do have to say that the shorthand of "a2a" is very convenient. Right now, the project is living in a folder called "a2a", and the CSS and JS files are prefixed with "a2a". Additionally, I think it's appropriate given my current location in Ann Arbor, commonly nicknamed A2 or AA. I definitely didn't know I was gonna wind up here when I started working on this project, but sometimes things just turn out the right way.

So what am I thinking instead of "Apples to AJAX"? I haven't completely decided, but I am personally leaning towards something like "Dangerous Apples". I like the fact that it has the adjective-noun format that you construct during the game, and also a certain non sequitur element to it. You can imagine playing "Apples" as a red card for the green card "Dangerous". That and I just like the rhythm - that whole dactyl-spondee sequence. Virgil was onto something for sure. I'm not sure if it's too crazy of a name though, and I wonder if I'd need to redo any of my artwork - the current apple logo doesn't look very dangerous for sure. (Maybe it's just a facade...)

Any other thoughts?

Status update

So before I get too far into my insights on this, I thought I'd drop a quick status note on what I've accomplished with the game so far. I've had the overall design doc finished for quite a while, and I created the overall HTML templates a few months ago. So that just leaves the functionality pretty much. I was working on the Javascript and AJAX for the pages, but I realized that in order to work on that, I needed some kind of back-end, so I've been working on that recently. Here's the list of things you can do right now:

* Create a game room - it will add you to the player list and shuffle the cards automatically
* Play a card (partially) - the display logic is in place, but it does not record which card you actually played anywhere.
* Set "away" status (partially) - again, the display logic is there, but no one's listening on the backend.

Since I'm running all this off my laptop for the time being, I don't have a heck of a lot to show you, but in case you haven't seen them previously, you can look at my original image-based renderings of the game screens here and here. They're still largely accurate for what I've done already!

So what does this mean for the inevitable question of "when it's done"? Well, I've always been hesitant to make a definitive statement of where I am, how much is left, and when you might be able to get your hands on it. In this business, your position can really change at a moment's notice based on something you hadn't considered; and this is even before you get into user tests and debugging, when anything goes!

I'm (sadly) reminded of my time in the online gaming community, and development teams' general dislike of progress meters indicating that the project is, say, 65% done. I remember one project had a progress meter that would simply display a random number every time the page was loaded, and I myself made an image of a progress meter divided into categories (graphics, maps, AI, etc.), in which each category's percentage was listed as "When It's Done". Needless to day, I used this image at every conceivable opportunity. So unfortunately, I am going to have to stick you with "When It's Done" for the time being, but I hope to use status updates like this one to give you at least some verification that I actually am working on it here.

Welcome!

Hi all!

This is my obligatory introduction post. This blog is focused on a current personal project of mine, namely a web-based version of the party game Apples to Apples. I'm going to detail my progress, and share my insights on designing and creating the game. So please drop by and feel free to comment!

-Mark