I thought I’d take some time to discuss one of my personal projects that’s been coming up a lot lately. This is called Nutsy Bolts, and is a multiplayer online browser-based word association game along the lines of Apples to Apples. I’ve been working on it for quite a while now (in fact, I mentioned it in my personal statement when I was applying to graduate school, so it’s been more than two and a half years), but it’s getting to the point where it’s about ready to go live!
Home page for Nutsy Bolts
I’ve had a lot of fun and gotten so much experience creating this. It just started as an experiment to teach myself AJAX (and this was back in pre-jQuery days, so I taught myself the nitty-gritty of it all), but it grew into so much more than that. I started doing some graphic design stuff, experimenting with bright, contrasting colors and layout. I built the design from scratch in Photoshop, then figured out how to squeeze it into HTML/CSS, with a tableless layout and everything. Then I did another graphic redesign from scratch, sticking to a few general principles, imagining what the game might look like if I made a physical version, and making sure to flout every principle of so-called “Web 2.0″ design. I also learned about the complexities of architecture needed for a multi-user networked application like this one. (I’m really glad I learned about threading in undergrad!) I’m sure I’ll have a lot more to learn about maintaining a live application and a community as well, once this goes live.
Anyway, most of my readers already know about this, but I am basically constantly looking for people to playtest. I seem to have ironed out most of the showstopping bugs for now, but it’s always great to get people’s feedback for the future, and on top of that I’d like to give it a stress test to make sure it won’t come screeching to a halt when more than 10 people try to play. Always a good thing to know!