I'm Back (Again)

Raleigh was lots of fun. Ed and Jennifer have an incredible house, and it was great to see everyone.

I got to watch the sun rise during the drive, and made it to Raleigh without incident. After catching up and touring the house, the last of our group arrived. (About a half dozen or so of us—mostly friends from undergrad, and friends of friends—get together every month or so. Due to Ed and Jennifer building and moving into their new house, this is our first meeting in a couple of months.)

I don't talk about it much (partially because it's rather geeky, mostly because very few people care even the slightest), but in addition to chatting and having fun, we play a fairly involved, very-long-term game. It's a role-playing game, but more casual and more social than a lot of them: more like a team-based board game with fighting and problem solving. No funny dice or creepy dress-up or anything like that. =P It's got all the immersiveness of a good video game, without the "blank stare" and anti-social tendencies. =P

Big Project

I've slowly been working on a HUGE web application to let us play the game online, since several people in our group recently moved far away. (Except for Ed and Jennifer, people had to drive 3-5 hours each way this weekend, and 3 people couldn't make it at all.) As distance and schedules get more troublesome, we're hoping to move the game online so we can continue to include people who can't always make it.

The system is basically a map (a board with terrain and various features) with a whole bunch of "things" on it (characters, objects, structures, icons, etc), where each player can "do stuff" to the "things" (identify/move/edit/create/delete/talk to/perform actions/etc for all characters/objects/equipment/structures/decorations/markers/etc on the map), within limits and rules that might change on-the-fly as the game progresses. Everything is persistent and shared between all the players, so any changes I make on my screen (like click+dragging one of my characters to a new location, for example) will automatically appear on everyone else's screen (unless it's a private or hidden "thing" or action), and vice versa. Most changes and actions are moderated by one person who's "in charge of" the game, who's got an even larger and more powerful interface than everyone else.

It's a HUGE system: the second-largest project I've ever worked on, trumped only by the application behind my Master's thesis (which took about a year of steady coding and contained over 750k of tightly-written, hand-written code in the final system, spread across ~70 files). This project is easily the most "edge case"-oriented system I've made, since anybody can potentially need to do anything, and the system has to offer the capability in a findable and usable way that doesn't disrupt the game flow.

The whole thing is a massive pile of PHP, SQL, JS, and AJAX, and when it's finished I expect it'll be the highlight of my portfolio, and possibly even a small-time commercial venture. It'll probably be a month or so before it's remotely playable, though, and 3-6 months before version 1.0 is finished—although for now the job search is top priority so I'm not really devoting much time to the system.

Although I'm getting a lot of help and assistance from other people in our group, I'm doing nearly all of the conceptualization, design, and development work on my own—so I'll likely be talking about it and linking to demos in the future. Apologies to anybody who finds this mind-numbingly boring, but it's very fun and interesting to me. ;-)

Next Weekend

It looks like I'll be visiting Clemson next weekend to see friends there: bowling, dinner, and a wine tasting. I need to send out an email about that, actually.... I think I'll end here and go do that now. =)

How was everyone else's weekend?