Archive for August, 2008
Braid: The Tip of the Indie Trend?
Warning: This column contains the kind of linkbait that can waste entire days. While all links are technically safe for work, they are not safe for productivity.
Xbox Live declared this the Summer of Arcade, and we here at GamerDNA have been watching and thoroughly enjoying the action. And by "we" I mean "the other guys on the team" because frankly, I sucked at arcade games when they required me to pour in quarters, and I still suck at them. I have the reflexes of an elderly tree sloth, and the nervous system of a cat in a room full of rocking chairs. The combination means that eight year old girls peer up at me in pity, and say, "Boy, you’re terrible," in tones that sound like "Boy, is that skin condition catching?"
Experience Roundup – FPS Edition
This week we’re starting a regular feature on the blog where we take a look at what our members are saying about the games they play and the experiences they had. This week, I decided to go right to the well to look at the genre that I love most – the First Person Shooter.
gamerDNA.com featured on ChannelFlip.com
ChannelFlip.com’s games editor Katharine Fletcher recently did a piece on Social Networking for Gamers. Always saving the best for last, Katharine features gamerDNA.com at the end of her video. You can check out the video below:
There’s a lot for the spotlight Katharine and welcome to all ChannelFlip viewers who found us through the video!
On the Road to OpenID
This week was a big push on OpenID preparations. For those of you that don’t know about OpenID, it is essentially a way for you to keep the same login name and password accross a myriad of sites (LiveJournal,Yahoo, and SmugMug are three good examples).
The plan is that every existing and new account on gamerDNA.com will serve as an OpenID. With this ID you can log in to your gamerDNA profile and other OpenID enabled sites, and you’ll soon be able to use it to access all of the sites on the gamerDNA Alliance. So in the near future, your profile will be accessible at:
<member name>.gamerdna.com
It will be one, simple URL to remember. Unfortunately, This does introduce a few issues that we will be tackling this week and next.
- We will be emailing guild/clan/group leaders who have been inactive for three months or more explaining they will have to change their subdomain (<shortname>.gamerdna.com) if it conflicts with an active member. You do NOT have to change your guild/clan name, just your URL (the <shortname> part mentioned earlier. You will be given an easy form to do so.
- We will email members that have been inactive for three months and notify them that they have to change their name if it conflicts with an active guild using an easy form as well.
- If you are an active or new member, and your name conflicts with a guild, than the member will be asked to pick a new name using an easy form.
- If you have a user name with any characters NOT supported for use as a subdomain, (something like !| H@voc |!) you will be prompted to change your username to something valid on your next login. All usernames must be numbers, letters, or hyphens… no other characters, no spaces.
These restrictions have already been in the product for all new members and guilds (except for underscores, as there was a bug) since the beginning of August, 2008.
Ultimately, we are doing this because it creates a really simple way to link people to groups and members… and it allows us to leverage OpenID in some new an innovative ways, which you will see in the future.
If you guys have any questions about the whole process, feel free to field them over to support@gamerdna.com!
August 25th Release Notes
Here it is… your moment of Zen… and build notes.
This week we focused a lot on getting ready for OpenID, so most of the work that is hitting the product is bug fix related.
Member Profile Enhancements/Changes
- Kongregate added as an AKA to your profile.
- The member challenge performance issues have been fixed and the gadget put back on the member home page.
- RSS Import experiences will now run regularly. You can put in any RSS feed and it will automatically pull it into your Profile page. This allows you to pipe in content from other places where you contribute and aggregate it all together.
- When auto-generated blog entries use member names, we are no longer assuming the case of the username. They go in as-is, and if that means that a sentence starts with a lowercase letter, that is how it is. This is based on user feedback to see their name correct.
- New games added to your DNA will now respect the watchlist flag correctly.
- Cleaned up the formatting of long game names in the panel so they wrap without breaking the layout.
- AKAs are now set to Public by default instead of friend’s only to encourage sharing.
Guild Hosting Enhancements/Changes
- New Warhammer guild theme, Spoils of War – Destruction!
- An image transition switcher has been added to the guild hosting creation page.
- Fixed the More smiley button on the guild WYSIWYG pages.
- For guild sites, the nav will now highlight properly when you are on an active section.
- Disabled the bartle pie chart/flash component until the new one is ready running off the new data.
General Site Enhancements/Changes
- The homepage now displays information about the Bartle quiz with an action button to get started.
- All PlayerVox articles have been republished to the company blog for their new home. PlayerVox was an old GuildCafe online publication. You can find most of them in the category: Gaming Industry
- Added an icon for Braid. If you aren’t playing it, you should be!
- Proper paging added to the Message of the Day in the header so that it helps with site performance.
- The footer for the site has been rebuild to properly display in all cases.
- Repaired a small bug in the nav that prevented game lists from loading in the DNA panel.
- Fixed an issue where the footer was covering up the comment section for images.
- Removed Tags from the blog feed on the homepage so the display is cleaner.
- Turned some headers into links on the alliance homepage.
- Cleaned up some formatting of the quiz results page.
- Fixed some grammar in the XFire auto-blog entries.
- Fixed some formatting issues on the image pages.
- Fixed a missing icon in the activity feed.
- Repaired the icon for Lila Dreams.
- Corrected the CSS to repair spacing issues in the forum thread view.
- Fixed a typo in the FPS quiz (Question 16)
That’s it for now! We will be doing a separate post later with more information on the changes surrounding OpenID.
gamerDNA + PAX = Party
If you didn’t know, this week marks one of the most significant weeks in gaming with PAX, the Penny Arcade Expo. For those of you lucky gamers that are going to be there for all fun, gamerDNA has a limited supply of tickets to our own PAX Party. You’ll get to hangout with some of the people behind gamerDNA, play Rock Band, and enjoy Free Drinks at the bar. So, if you live in or around Seattle or are going to be there for PAX, here are the details:
- WHO: Any gamerDNA members who are in or around Seattle during PAX
- WHAT: A gamerDNA party featuring free drinks, Rock Band, and awesome people
- WHERE: The Grand Hyatt Hotel
- WHEN: 7:00PM-Midnight on Friday, August 29
- WHY: Because you’re awesome!
We do ask that you RSVP for the event because tickets are limited, to do so, just let us know through our support page! We’ll see you in Seattle!
gamerDNA invades PAX this weekend!
With only a few days to go, I’m excited to announce officially that gamerDNA will be at the Penny Arcade Expo this weekend. While we won’t have a booth at PAX, you will be able to find Jon Radoff, Steve Sopp, Russell Miner and Sam Houston roaming around the convention floor and checking out all the excitement of PAX. gamerDNA will be making the rounds the entire weekend with gamerDNA t-shirts in hand, so if you want one and see one of us don’t hesitate to talk to us and let us know by messaging us on Twitter or private messaging QforQ on gamerDNA.
We will try to "live-tweet" our adventures at the Penny Arcade Expo using our gamerDNA twitter account as well as Sam’s twitter account. If there are any pictures of video taken you can count on those being put up on this blog along with a wrap up when we get back next week.
That about wraps it up, see everyone there!
Do you TF2?
Here at gamerDNA we love Team Fortress 2 just about as much as everyone else does: A lot - Which is why everyone here in the office was pumped to find out that we now have our own Team Fortress 2 Server! Just connect to 8.9.6.209:27015 and you’ll be in the fray with all your gamerDNA buddies! While you’re at it, why not add Team Fortress 2 to your games collection? Then, when you stab me in the back you can write about it so that all the world can see how you embarrassed me in front of my coworkers!
Want to get an idea of what your fellow gamerDNA TF2 fans will play like? Make sure they’ve taken the FPS Playstyle Quiz so you can now how they’ll react when the going gets tough. And hey! While you’re at it, join the gamerDNA Steam community!
