Side Project: Ruin_Rails
I've been putting a lot of effort into a project using Ruby on Rails and I wanted to share a bit about it. It is a social portal designed for gaming communities and I'm early stages of user testing some of it's more basic features.'
I built a page with a few screen caps for a little more detail at /ruin_rails. The full source code is availabile on Github and the heroku testing environment is open to anyone who would like to see it first hand.
The project is mostly for my own enjoyment, but I do dream of being able to deploy a website network of gaming communities; I think there is a huge market of gamers looking for these kinds of features in a website.
David Mann - - May 10, 2012
Global Game Jam 2012
The Global Game Jam at the Madison location was a blast again this year. My team won first place at the Madison Game Jam site in popular vote for our game Infinite Carnage!
All my thanks to the volunteers who hosted us at Herzing and all the sponsors and good-hearted people who provided food. The event was a total success and you should be proud.
Infinite Carnage is a simple multiplayer hack'n'slash game with loads of personality. Gameplay is fast and difficult and offers some interesting variety depending on what weapons your group is randomly given. It was one of two games that supported multiplayer and the only game that supported up to four players. Finally, we filled the game to brimming with personality. We had beautiful art for each of our splash screens, four, well developed characters that were hand animated and voice acted, an amusing selection of enemies, and a metal music track that we recorded on site.
This year I felt much more relaxed and confident in my ability to get things done in a timely manner and I felt much less stressed out by the end. I'm really proud of my team and I can't wait to do it again next year.
David Mann - - February 06, 2012
Riding on Rails
In a fit of whimsy I decided to attend the Madison Ruby conference. Well not entirely. I had a good friend (@PhilCrissman) in town who had already decided to go - so I bought my ticket and went too. I wanted to see first hand, from some fellow code geeks, what Ruby and Ruby on Rails was all about. While there, it occurred to me that whatever tools I program with should be as radical as I am, and that Rails might just be that radical.
The conference was very helpful, but a lot of things were above my head. I liked what I saw, but I needed a good book to get me started. I found RailsTutorial.org by Michael Hartl and could not have been more pleased.
Start to finish, Hartl guides the reader though all the basics of Ruby on Rails programming using a simple Twitter look-alike. That sounds like a good place to start, but what I really liked about it is that he demonstrates not just how, but how a person should develop with Rails. The scope of the book includes many concepts and practices that aren't required for programming with Rails, but that are conventional within the community. And, from what I learned at Madison Ruby, understanding the community is very important for understanding The Rails Way (best practices in Rails).
The end result is a fully functional example of everything I learned. Most of it is exactly to Hartl's specs; but some isn't. There are a few things the perfectionist in me wants to change, but it's time to move on to a real project.
David Mann - - November 01, 2011
Virulent
Virulent is the game that I worked on exclusively during my time working for The Morgridge Institute for Research in the Educational Research Challenge Area (ERCA). My involvement with the project included programming tools for level creation and gameplay using C# and Unity, level design and lots of QA near its release.
The game is available free of charge on iTunes for the iPad and on the web. There are plans to make it available by other means in the future.
The project of bringing Virulent to the iPad was a first in many ways for me. It was the first time I worked with a professional team on a game project, worked on a learning game, applied the skills I've been trained in. But the most exciting way it was a first for me is that it was the first shipped game I'd ever been involved in creating.
More information about the project is available on the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery website.
*Update: Virulent has since won an award! Read the full article here.
David Mann - - June 14, 2011
Story in MMORPGs
I've been thinking about the presentation and function of story in MMORPGs. Story is a key element of the genre and it seems a good story can, solely, be reason enough to play an MMORPG. Playing the "Cataclysm" expansion for WoW drew my attention to the subject and gave me an idea I'd like to explore over the next few months through my Basement MMO project.
Cataclysm was interesting for many reasons. There were new starting areas for the two new races, which meant brand new story-lines for each race, as well as for the player character. Cataclysm also introduced a new leveling experience through the redesign of legacy content and the introduction of new content aimed at new, current, and returning players. There exists a lot of opportunity for great storytelling in any MMORPG, but especially for WoW, given Blizzard's reputation for polish.
The new goblin starting area was my first stop. The primary functions of the story seemed to be endearment of the character to the player, as well as making the player feel as though they were playing a unique and significant hero within the larger game world. The story was amusing, however, after a few hours I found myself baffled. I'd spent over two hours playing an MMORPG and had yet to be given the suggestion to group up with another player. Moreover, the linear structure of the quests would have discouraged grouping at all. The story wasn't compelling and the sense of accomplishment it was trying to give me felt forced.
This is when I started reflecting upon my own experiences; what I thought were the most compelling stories in my experience playing MMORPGs. An opportunity to discuss this topic with some fellow players presented itself at the annual bonfire hosted by a member of my former WoW guild. Players old and new, current and retired, arrived from all over the country to spend a few days together, put real faces to the voices they've heard for years on ventrillo, and burn a mighty pyre of wood. Once we were all together, the answer was obvious - the most compelling stories were those about players themselves. The polished Blizzard story, brimming from raid instances, was completely ignored in favor of talking about who was present, who got the first kill, who got the first drop. We talked about the challenges that have faced our guild at one time or another, past drama on our guild forums, and what former members were up to these days.
So why not make an MMORPG with no story? No written story at all. Maybe creating the best MMOG of all time is simply creating the best environment possible for players to create their own stories.
