ArcadeFly Blog

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.