http://programmerjoe.com There is no crying in the red circle Tue, 29 Apr 2008 05:33:43 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Andy Brice recently posted on getting feedback from software customers. With Pirates, our options are similar but somewhat tweaked. We host our own forums for our user community to hang out on. On most MMOs about 10% of the player base actually uses these, and they self-select into a very ... http://programmerjoe.com/2008/04/28/getting-feedback/ A couple of weeks ago I took the week's vacation from my job as the Producer of Pirates of the Burning Sea to sit at home, in my basement, and write code 12 hours a day for 8 straight days. It was a fantastic experience and I would love to ... http://programmerjoe.com/2008/04/27/coding-vacations/ This has nothing whatsoever to do with games, but it's a great talk on what kinds of startups turn into giant successes. Greg McAdoo is a partner at Sequoia Capital. http://programmerjoe.com/2008/04/27/greg-mcadoo-at-startup-school/ Lately I've developed an intense fascination with Augmented Reality (AR). This doesn't bode well for my Facebook game, but learning about the current state of AR is taking up quite a lot of my free time. This post is my attempt to distill what I've learned so far. What is Augmented ... http://programmerjoe.com/2008/04/20/an-augmented-reality-primer/ This is what I looked like yesterday: FLS had a Mustache Month contest in March.   I won the Teddy Roosevelt Memorial Prize. I'm back to normal today. My wife is relieved.  :) http://programmerjoe.com/2008/04/01/i-need-a-pith-helmet/ I didn't actually work on the game today, but I did get the turn processor running for real this morning, so I figured I'd put that link up again: http://apps.facebook.com/primesuspect I finished off everything I had on my list for yesterday. The UI is much improved, but I still ... http://programmerjoe.com/2008/03/30/facebook-week-finale/ Maybe you didn't realize this, but Facebook Week has two weekends, so it's actually 9 days long. I revamped the way the ASP.NET code handles its own URLs and links between pages yesterday so I could get Prime Suspect up and running on the hosting provider. I never heard back ... http://programmerjoe.com/2008/03/29/facebook-week-day-8/ My murder mystery game has a name!  I'm calling it "Prime Suspect".  Thanks for the suggestion, Nissa. I signed up with ReliableSite.net for hosting yesterday, but they don't seem to have emailed the "here's how you use our service" message, so I didn't realize they were finished with my order until ... http://programmerjoe.com/2008/03/28/facebook-week-day-7/ As expected, I didn't get much coding time yesterday. I did knock off a couple quick Facebook integration features: All mystery pages now have a mystery-specific comment section.  This was one tag (with a tiny bit of C# code to generate a unique ID.) I added a popup dialog that allows you ... http://programmerjoe.com/2008/03/27/facebook-week-day-6/ Yesterday was the first time someone other than me installed the game. Thanks for the help, Nissa and Tim! I have the main game UI up and running now. I'm not really happy with how it looks, but it's more or less functional. Now I need to get started ... http://programmerjoe.com/2008/03/26/facebook-week-day-5/