Battlefield, Zelda, Halo, Skyrim, and Uncharted all released within a month of each other.

Someone is out to get me.

The Wall Street Journal has an interview with DICE’s Lead Gamer Tester and Executive Producer that I found really interesting. Awesome to have more insight into user testing outside of the web/application realm.

There was one bit in particular that struck a chord with me:

I don’t know why, but I always feel ashamed about the games I’m involved in making. I can’t even bring myself to start up “Battlefield Bad Company 2,” our last game, because I feel so ashamed. I know it is a great product but still I only see the things we could have done better.

Patrick Bach, DICE Executive Producer

UX, Interaction designers, and others who help plan, execute and analyze user tests are often perfectionists, and also tend to be their own worst critics. It’s true in web design, and apparently it’s also true in game design.

For what it’s worth, Battlefield Bad Company 2 was a ridiculously good game (one of my all time favorites), and Battlefield 3 is looking to raise the bar quite a bit. Just more evidence that investing in user centric design, just like investing in outstanding talent and leadership, is crucial to building great products.

Most normal people I know have at least one sport they try and keep up with. Could be Football, Tennis, or maybe even something like competitive Poker.

Myself? I’m a fan of competitive video games. Starcraft, specifically.

It’s a geeky choice for evening entertainment, but I’m definitely not alone in my programming selection. Over 60,000 people tuned in from all over the world this past weekend to watch a live tournament in Spain called DreamHack. Some events see even more attention than this—and the winners often take home prizes in the tens (or hundreds) of thousands of dollars.

A lot of the individuals who “cast” live video streams use live video streaming service Justin.tv. JTV is great, but I find it a little difficult to navigate my way around the site, or watch video on my tablet. Thankfully, JTV has put together an API that has allowed me to create my own customized stream browser :)

I spent some time last night putting together a basic video browser with the API that tracks some of my favorite streams. I don’t currently have any plans for it, but I’m hosting the app at GamerChannels.com for the time being.

With how much momentum I’ve seen competitive gaming gain in the past 2 years, who knows… I may invest some more time into this project so it will be more useful for others.

Just spent the past 2 hours troubleshooting a problem I was having with the Justin.tv API. Thought I’d save a few headaches for anyone else who runs into this problem and post about it.

I was having no trouble getting the API to do the things I wanted, but the Embed code for streams seemed to be borked.

I kept getting: “Something went wrong: Error #2048″

Did some digging and wasn’t able to find any error code documentation. I couldn’t even get embed codes working directly from channels.

Turns out that for whatever reason, Justin.tv doesn’t like “localhost”. That’s a pretty strange quirk… not sure if it’s intentional or not (haven’t seen any mention of it in the API documentation). I added a new host “test.local” and was immediately able to see the embed codes working.

Guide for setting up custom hosts on Mac →
…and on Windows →

Today, my good friend Michael Caldwell launched his 2012 campaign for the Georgia State House (District 20). I’m happy to once again be a part of his campaign. Here are a few screenshots from the site we launched this morning.

I’m very proud to support Caldwell’s campaign. In 2010, I believe we ran one of the best campaigns in Georgia, and I’m looking forward to once again setting an example of how local campaigns can be operated honestly and transparently.

Had some fun with the Wufoo API while working on this project. Really impressed with how easy it was working with Wufoo and MailChimp together.

Working with Andrew Maier and Carl Smith from nGen works out in Crested Butte, CO this week. Loving the weather and the location out here!

…and the food.

Spent a good chunk of the day working on a nifty filter system for a project I’m assisting nGen Works with. We needed a way to filter entries by multiple key/value pairs.

In other words, if a table has the columns “Name” and “Eye Color”, there needed to be a way to search for both at the same time (ie: “David” and “Brown” would return any entries where the “Name” column contained “David”, and the “Eye Color” column matches “Brown Eyes”.)

Pretty straightforward stuff, but it was my first time building a system like this almost entirely with Javascript. Filters can be applied and deleted instantly, and there is an autoassist feature that prints out all the unique values of searchable columns.

We’ve barely touched the styles on the app, but it’s shaping up nicely.

Quick note: Hopefully it’s clear that this is all just fakesy dummy data!

I’d like to write a post about the code for the system sometime. There is still some work to be done, and it would need some tweaking to be more useful in areas outside the application we’re building.

My Hulu Plus subscription was short lived. There were some good times though.

At the end of the day, Hulu Plus doesn’t work for me for a few reasons:

1. Too few shows. At any given time, I’m lucky to find more than one show I’m interested in available on Hulu. For the past 4 weeks or so, I haven’t watched a single episode (mind you, I don’t have TV, so this is literally my avenue for watching almost anything).
2. Too few shows. Again. Yup, it needed to be on this list twice. Even if there are 1 or 2 shows running at a certain time of the year, that’s usually an average of about 3-6 episodes a month.
3. Ads? I don’t have much free time, and I don’t like to spend 10 minutes per episode watching ads. I will pay extra money usually if it means fewer ads.
4. Speaking of price. It’s not like Hulu is on the cheap as it is. In the past 2 months, I watched 6 episodes. That’s about $2.5/episode (and with ads). On Amazon, I can buy a full season of 13 episodes in HD for $2.08/episode, and I own that season forever to watch whenever I’d like. And there are no commercials. And it has more shows that I’m actually interested in.

I really love the idea of a subscription service like Hulu, and I think the price is about right. If they could just make it consistently worth that price, I’ll definitely become a subscriber again.

Originally posted this on Google+:

My biggest problem with Google+ so far is the ability to make a post “Public”.

So far, my experience with G+ has been a noisy one, where the majority of the posts I see are public. One of the main advantages of G+ over platforms like Twitter is the ability to reverse subscribe contacts to “List” like groups. I can share all of my developer related problems with a Developers Circle, and all of my personal updates with a Friends Circle. I don’t need to blast everyone that has me in a circle with all of my updates.

The current Google+ depends on trusting anyone you follow to only share the types of updates you want from them… and provides no way of telling that person what types of updates you’re interested in.

If I want to add someone to a circle because they’re great at coding, I don’t necessarily want updates about their pets too.

I’d almost prefer a service that reverses the way circles are handled. Allow users to set up a personal collection of post categories unique to them. When I try to follow that user, I can check off from their collection of categories what types of posts I’m interested in from them.

I’m on Google+ now. If you’d like to connect, you can find me here.