Archive for June, 2009
GamerDNA Community Newsletter #5
Hello GamerDNA Nation!
It’s been a busy month here at GamerDNA, with lots of work going on behind the scenes…and as a result, we now have plenty of stuff to talk about!
Last week was E3, the annual Video Game Industry trade show for all the game publishers/developers to show off their cool stuff to the press and retailers (like Best Buy and Wal-Mart). The show has become a huge press spectacle over the years, and this year was no exception. Exclusive game announcements and trailers, even The Beatles made an appearance at this year’s E3.
The "Harmonix House Band", featuring Harmonix’s CEO Alex Rigopulos on drums, playing The Beatles: Rock Band
This newsletter is jam packed with details on the latest GamerDNA updates, the latest GamerDNA News, and much more. We hope you enjoy it!
How To: GamerDNA on Twitter and Facebook
With the recent announcement of Tweet My Gaming, it’s time to create a bit of a How-To on integrating your GamerDNA with Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, or Tumblr. With GamerDNA, you can easily update your status on all of these social networks that you’re already on, showing all your friends the games that you have played or your latest activity on GamerDNA.
To start off, you will have to be a member of GamerDNA, so if you haven’t done that already, head on over and register right now!
After you’ve registered and setup your GamerDNA account, make sure you head on over and add all your network ID’s to your gamerDNA. GamerDNA can automatically broadcast your Xbox Live, PlayStation Network, Steam and Xfire gaming, so all you have to do is add your username on those networks to your GamerDNA. For the platforms that we don’t tie in to, like Nintendo Wii, you can manually add activities to your GamerDNA and have those broadcast as well.
To setup your Facebook and Twitter account (or other networks), head on over to your Broadcast Settings in your Manage your GamerDNA section of GamerDNA. Here you can configure all your settings so that you can broadcast your gaming activity to your friends.
Facebook:
Setting up Facebook is quick and easy, since GamerDNA has implemented Facebook Connect to quickly connect GamerDNA to Facebook. After a few clicks and a couple settings toggled, you should be good to go!
Here is an example of what your Facebook updates will look like:
Twitter:
Setting up Twitter is also quick and easy. With GamerDNA you can automatically Tweet your Gaming!
Here is what a GamerDNA Tweet will look like:
If you’re a user of Tumblr and FriendFeed, we work with those networks as well. Head on over to your Broadcast Settings section and you’ll be all set!
That’s about it! If you have any questions on how to setup your Social Network accounts with GamerDNA, please let us know by contacting support.
Have fun!
Sam “QforQ‘ Houston
GamerDNA Community Manager
Bloons Tower Defense 3 – GamerDNA featured Play Now game
This week’s featured GamerDNA Play Now game is Bloons Tower Defense 3, a fantastic tower defense game on Kongregate.
The game is similar to many other tower defense games, in that you have to defend your base against the onslaught of enemies…except in this game you have to defend yourself from a barrage of deadly balloons, using Monkeys that have been trained to throw darts at fast speeds. As you build up more cash, you can hold off the onslaught of balloons by creating Missile Launchers, Saw Blade Shooters, Catapults, and a Super Monkey which can throw darts at insane speeds.
Bloons Tower Defense 3 starts out by giving you 75 lives, which you need to hold out with at least one life left for all 50 rounds to beat each track. The game has a variety of different tracks, with different strategies that can be used on each one. After you beat each track you can receive a medal, which is saved to your account and shows up when you view the track listing.
The game is one of our favorite Kongregate games on GamerDNA, and we encourage everyone to check it out! All you have to do is go to the Bloons Tower Defense 3 game page on GamerDNA, the press the Play Now button!
Have fun!
E3 2009 – Announcement of TweetMyGaming
The annual game industry show, known as E3, has come and gone and wow..there are a TON of games to be excited about this year. As a gamer I was blown away by the announcements and offerings that the publishers brought to Los Angeles last week…and as the Community Manager of GamerDNA, I was also excited to make an announcement of our own.
The show officially kicked off with the Microsoft Press Conference, which featured over 10 games (which most were exclusive), and some huge celebrities like Paul and Ringo Starr from The Beatles, as well as Steven Spielberg. As a huge music fan, it was pretty awesome to see the first world reveal of The Beatles: Rock Band…as well as see the two remaining members of The Beatles. My favorite part of the conference was actually the opening of the show, which featured Harmonix’s amazing opening cinematic for The Beatles: Rock Band.
The "Harmonix House Band", featuring Harmonix’s CEO Alex Rigopulos on drums, playing The Beatles: Rock Band
Some of the other highlights from the conference were the game play footage shown from Alan Wake, Splinter Cell Conviction, Halo: ODST, and Modern Warfare 2.
The next day, Tuesday, both Sony and Nintendo had their conferences. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to make these…but I’ve got to say I’m pretty excited about Uncharted 2 and God of War III. Judging from the lines to play God of War III, I think most everyone is excited about it as well. The game looks beautiful on the PS3, with tons of gore and a lot of action. Spring of 2010 can’t come fast enough.
There were a lot of games to check out at E3, and we’d like to hear what you are most excited about. Let us know, "What game are you most excited about from E3 2009?" by posting a comment to QforQ’s game post!
Besides all the excitement of E3 around the game announcements and getting a chance to play the games, GamerDNA was at the trade show to make an announcement of our own. Last week we announced the launch of TweetMyGaming, a site that tracks all of the gaming conversations on Twitter in real-time, and surfaces the most popular games that are being talked about right now.
On the website you can watch all the game related tweets from Twitter stream in to the site in real-time, see what the top games are on Twitter, or take a look at a particular game’s page on TweetMyGaming and see what people are saying about that game.
Last week I had the pleasure of doing interviews with MTV Multiplayer and Current TV throughout the week about TweetMyGaming, as the site is a great way to see how people are reacting to game announcements and press, in real-time. You can check out my segments with MTV Multiplayer below:
MTV Multiplayer - TweetMyGaming Day 1 Wrap-Up
MTV Multiplayer – TweetMyGaming Day 2 Wrap-Up
MTV Multiplayer – TweetMyGaming Day 3 Wrap-Up
We created the site as a mash-up between the Twitter API, and the newly launched GamerDNA API, called Helix. The GamerDNA Helix API is in beta right now, and we’ll be adding more and more to it as time goes by. Right now, even in it’s beta state, it is quite powerful and gives you access to a large amount of data and features from GamerDNA. To find out more information about the Helix API, please check out our documentation here.
Well that’s a wrap for this year’s E3 for GamerDNA. We’re very excited about TweetMyGaming.com, if you guys have any feedback on it please let us know by posting a comment below!
Thanks!
Sam "QforQ" Houston
GamerDNA Community Manager
June 2nd Release Notes
Hi Everyone,
We are hard at work on a major (and somewhat total) site revamp right now that will be landing in a few months… but we did want to squeak out a small update with some bug fixes and a new tracking gadget on your member home page.
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Your gamerDNA Track List
This tracking widget allows you to pick up to 20 friends and get updates about what they are playing right now, or have played recently. It gives you a quick one-shot look at what everyone has done recently.
By clicking the "edit" link next to the track list, you can select which friends you want to actively track. Their status and game play history will then update on this gadget every 5 minutes.
You can also click "View All Friends" and get status updates for everyone on the widget (20 per page) if you are curious what your extended network is doing.
This is a small first step towards a completely revamped member homepage that not only delivers real-time content about the games you like, but also updates around the your friends and people that you might find interesting.
GamerDNA Helix
We continue to move forward with great progress on our API called gamerDNA Helix. If you are a developer, skilled in the ways of XML APIs… check out our beta documentation. We are interestedin any feedback that you have to offer about how our API evolves. We have some pretty cool things in store that will empower you to create a variety of deeply integrated applications.
View the beta documentation here:
http://docs.google.com/View?id=dcrj8bnk_25chkxgwhp
Please note, that this documentation is subject to change. Any API discussion/questions can be submitted in the API Forum.
The full list of updates in this release after the jump!
