ArcadeFly Blog

We recently fixed most the bugs currently on ArcadeFly. There’s a few in the works, but nothing major outstanding. We recently upgraded to Rails 2.2 with Passenger instead of Mongrel. Things are really coming along though and become stable enough to build on. We’re planning on expanding out to some new features in the coming weeks, but still looking for suggestions on where to place our focus. If you see any problems with the way things are now, please email me or just reply to this post. We’re looking into some better ways of tracking bugs, but the free ones don’t seem to compare).

Thanks to a pair of posts on Arcade Heroes and Destructoid, we’re slowly building some real momentum now. It’s been a bust week with a lot of updates, but things are looking good. You can now claim arcades and, upon approval, edit them. I’m actively approving claims whenever I see them, so don’t be scared to claim 10 or 20 arcades if you go to all of them.

Also, we’re actively looking for administrators to help out across the boards. Administrators will help make sure the game listings are up to date and without duplicates, as well as approve claims, edit any arcade, and probably more once abilities are in. If you’re interested in really helping out in the long haul, and don’t mind if includes the occasional tedius bit of data entry (like entering the games available at contact with us if you’re interested.

As things start to be used it’s always easier to flesh out what should be improved. For this week that has been the games list. After taking a tour of Orlando I ran into a surprising number of games that weren’t in the GameFaqs listing that we’re using here. The solution is to move off gamefaqs as the definitive listing for games. You’ll notice that the URLs no longer use the gamefaqs ids as the URL parameters. It’s just not a good idea to base your system that much on another one of which you have no control. Plus, as I was going arcade to arcade I was noticing other items that we might want to track (pool tables, air hockey, basketball, etc) that just wouldn’t fit into the mold if we required all games to exist on gamefaqs.

As for the games that aren’t on GameFaqs, we’ll soon be adding all games from the Killer List of Video Games as well. It’s just about ready, but I’m running into a problem with game names that are similar but not exactly the same. After I write up a script to merge the differences between these two we should have another 1,000 or so games available.

So, there’s no flood of users, or flood of push for that — just a flood of development to make things better and more kickass. Since last week we added a great way for users to add games to arcades, put a light barrier to entry in place for editing arcades through the process of claiming an arcade, added exception notifications (just emails us when something goes wrong), automated deployments, made all html valid and worked towards a faster yslow rating and of course. The last development push will be to create a good iphone version of the add games page. This will be used while walking around arcades to add games, so it’s important for it to be as easy as possible. Lastly I’ll work on making the homepage more focused, which should help users to get started.

Having the site up and functional is a great boost to working on it though. If anyone is finding it difficult to find time to work on a project, I’d suggest spend some time to deploy a working copy and get it out there. There’s more incentive now than ever before to make fixes and improvements.

It’s official — ArcadeFly is available for the public… kind of. Right now we’re still in the “testing the waters” stage where we’re on pins and needles to see if everything works. So far it’s been surprisingly smooth sailing. The basics are all in place — people can register, add arcades, edit games at arcades, favorite arcades and games, map arcades and see distance calculations. That’s pretty much the core functionality. For now though, since there isn’t much in the system, my main emphasis is on creating a kick-ass way for people to add/edit arcades and the games at those arcades. It’s still a problem though, as we can’t have people just editing them straight out — there needs to be some system in place. That’s the top priority to get that going asap.

Releasing the first version of a product should never be feature complete. That is to say you probably shouldn’t do every feature you want to do right from the start. Things that seem important in the planning stages might become altogether worthless to the users, while they spot huge holes that you’ve left unfilled elsewhere. In the end it’s all about getting done the core of your project — what people are coming there to see. If the forgot password form process ends up being a little odd, or some graphic seems a bit off; but users are still able to do what you wanted them to then you have yourself a great success. The rest of the details can easily be hammered out, and even better organized with user feedback.

For ArcadeFly it’s obvious what the core features of the project are. Finding arcades to play games at. There are a few features that aren’t going to make it into launch, but nothing I’d call a showstopper. There won’t be a friends system, a comment system or a messaging system right out of the gate. For starters it’ll be all about finding the arcades. Then as people join up, I’ll see where resources are needed and probably work on adding more ways of users to communicate. This really makes sense anyways, after all how can you message people or add friends until there’s a user base out there. The lack of commenting I do miss, but it at least it means deferring those questions like “How do I weed out spam?” and “Who deletes spam?”. Doing more work now could very well lead me to investing even more time down a path I don’t want to go. Best to keep it simple while you can.

It’s been a slow couple months, but things are shaping up for an initial release this summer. The initial launch date was sometime in July, but now the goal is by the end of August. It’s not a matter of the site being extremely complex or anything, but just getting things right the first time. It’s coming along nicely though, and I think the finished product will be worth it. At the moment I’m upgrading the core of the site from Rails ~2.0.2 to Rails 2.1, the latest and greatest. It’s requiring a few plugin upgrades, but overall it was a quick process.

For the first release of products it seems like in most the books I’ve read they talk more about getting the basic foundation for a site for an initial launch, rather than getting something that’s good and people actually use. I’m taking an approach more along the lines with what’s described in Designing the Obvious for ArcadeFly though. Rather than skipping things I’m fully embracing them — if they’re essential to the user experience. I’m concentrating most on what people will use most — makes sense right? I’m taking this down to the small details like auto-selecting form fields, keeping tab navigation order logical and generally just trying to solve problems before they occur. For instance, on the forgot password form we ask for the email you signed up with. If you enter one that doesn’t exist it’ll ask you if you want to register, and if you click on the link, it’ll show the register form with the email you entered previously already filled in. Likewise, if you enter an address for distance calculations then decide to register, we’ll try to sync up your address with the fields on the address form.

Syncing up an address like “1486 E Buena Vista Dr, Lake Buena Vista, Florida, 32830″ (Disney Quest) with the individual parts by itself isn’t an easy task. You can try to parse this out by comma, and maybe if you’re lucky you’ll split it correctly. There is an easier way though — GeoKit to the rescue! Load up script/console and try out Geokit directly:

>> loc = GeoKit::Geocoders::GoogleGeocoder.geocode("1486 E Buena Vista Dr, Lake Buena Vista, Florida, 32830")
=> #<GeoKit::GeoLoc:0x223ba34 @state="FL", @success=true, @provider="google", @lng=-81.517122, @city="Orlando", @country_code="US", @lat=28.367984, @street_address="1486 N Buena Vista Dr", @full_address="1486 N Buena Vista Dr, Orlando, FL 32830, USA", @zip="32830", @precision="address">

Thanks GeoKit! Even if this was called with just “1486 E Buena Vista Dr, 32830″, we’d still get the same results down the latitude and longitude. From here it’s just a matter of using loc.city, loc.zip, loc.country_code as much as we need. For a user who just wants to come to ArcadeFly but not register, they can enter their address and we’ll save it in their session as a string (or at least that’s the plan), then if they decide to register this method helps split it apart. Pretty slick all around. Users shouldn’t have to enter data more than once after all.

Slowly inching towards the end of phase 1 now. Over the weekend I managed to wrap up just about all the remaining login/user interactions in ways I thought were intuitive. For this project I am doing most of this myself, with the help of the RESTful Authentication rails plugin. I did run into one awkward case I should probably check on a little more though. If a user has signed up but not activated their account, and they complete the “forgotten password” form, I need to rework it. I don’t like the way RESTful authentication does this part actually. You cannot reset your password unless you have already activated your account. I’d say whenever someone changes their password also set their activation code to null, making them activated. This is sort of a side effect of changing password, but it makes sense. If soeone can change their password they should meet the conditions for activation as well.

So what does that mean…? Phase 1 will be pretty barebones unfortunately. It will be an internal release to whoever is interested in testing things out. At this point it will not be possible to add/edit games or arcades, but the functionality of registering, finding arcades close to you or games close to you is in there, as is mapping. Once I get to a good stopping point in phase 2 in the next week or so I’ll probably put it up. If you’re interested in trying out the beta, give me a heads up and I’ll send you the info.

Phase 2 will be a maintenance release. Forms will be spiced up, a little more sharpening of the main focus of the site — that kind of thing. No new functionality will be included for this one, other than the ability to add arcades. Working out a way to edit arcades/games is going to be a little tricky. I don’t want to open it up completely as if it was a wiki, but it shouldn’t be difficult for someone that wants to contribute to do so. Once it’s possible to do the main point of the site, and do it extremely well, I’ll start implementing the “nice-to-haves” like arcade ratings, popular arcades/games and that kind of thing.