Hi Everyone!

Another big release for gamerDNA… new game pages have landed! This week is the first of a few releases targeted at new and improved game pages. This week we were focusing on getting the new layouts and gadgets running. Next week will be more fun features around matching, followed by some abilities to play games directly from gamerDNA! Look for that in the coming weeks!

Here are some of the new features of the game pages:

Game Header

Be sure to look at the top header of every game page. It contains some useful data about a game, also information about how popular the game is for that platform on the site. Click the "View full details" link to see a run down of all information we have about that game including top traits used to describe why players like that game.

Similar Games

First off, there is now a similar games gadget. This gadget works by looking at all the ways that gamers have traited a game… the setting, tone, features, playing as, playing against… and looks for similar games in the system that share significant overlaps in traits. If you want to see the popular traits on a game… click the "View Full Details" link at the top of every game page.

Similar games share the same platform as the game you are looking at.

Top Players and Contributors

This gadget shows the top players for various time frames, and also the top contributors. Whatever filters you pick, a cookie is set to remember them… so that you can pick your preferred filters and as you move from game to game, it will keep those filters active.

Are you a top player or a contributor on any game? If you aren’t, jump in and start adding content! Photos, game posts, game activity, etc.

Top Pictures (and videos)

This gadget allows you to easily browse the top pictures/screenshots for a game uploaded by users… but soon you will also have videos in here as well… Users won’t be able to upload videos but we will be sourcing some video content from partners. You can filter by votes and conversations and like the players gadget, your filter selections are remembered.

Check out the full list of changes in this build:

General Site changes/enhancemets

• Built out filters for browsing/sorting all of the activity on a game.
• Built out a brand new game page complete with a full activity feed, similar games, players, and pics.
• Built out a list of similar games. This works by matching against all of the traits used to describe a game… and looking for intersections of similar games. If there are not enough traits, it will factor in defaults based on similar genres and styles. Happy exploring!
• Built out a Top Players gadget for the game pages. It lists players, and contributors, and allows you to browse by a time frame of week, month, or all time. Any selections you make writes a cookie so that your settings are remembered so as you move between game pages, you can see the names of other gamers. Are you on any of the game lists?
• Built a new gadget for browsing pics. You can list by popularity (votes) as well as most recent and most comments. The gadget is also ready for video when we put it in.
• Built out the game activity feed to include game activity and posts…. coming next week… inclusion of pictures, mini-reviews, possibly video and more!
• Changed the game event writer to run continuously instead of waiting for a job to trigger which should improve reliability.
• Back populated missing game data for the 16th and the 17th for Xbox which was due to problems at 360voice on those days. We got the data but we never ran the jobs on gamerDNA to build the events. This has been corrected.
• Changed the game stats API to use the new game_stats table for a HUGE performance gain.
• Updated the screen shot that appears on the registration page to reflect our new profile look and layout.
• Fixed an issue where putting HTML in any of our auto-expanding text areas was breaking them.
• All labels in the game header will now hide if there is no data to display.
• There was a change to the warhammer pages that was causing incorrect parsing which was showing up in the API as a spelling error. This has been fixed an all signatures should work now.
• Back populated the Feb 11th game data from all the APIs to fill in data holes in game events.

Guild hosting changes/enhancements

• Fixed a guild issue that was causing confusion about how events display on the guild home page.
• Fixed an issue where older friend requests that were never resolved were causing duplicates.
• Added some information about how to add a game when trying to add a new game to a guild site.
• Smilies in the guild section now properly use PNGs to be more compatible with different backgrounds.
• The guild progress will now properly recognize 100% completion and hide the completion tasks.

Member profile changes/enhancements

• Corrected an issue where clicking the GROUPS link in the header was not bouncing your down to the group listing on the pulblic profile page. This is a temp fix until we build a sub page for group listings.

See you back here next week with many more game pages enhancements!