Behind-The-Scenes of a Board Games Website

Yup, you read it right.  This weekend saw a concerted effort to finish building the core FMG games engine completing the core functionality of the site.  I’ve spent the last three or four weeks coding away, rewriting, trying to deal with the complex state engine under the surface, and finally completed this on Sunday.

For those that have been following the progress of FastMovingGames and read the website development plan I posted originally, then you’ll understand the why this is such a milestone!

(For New Visitors, FastMovingGames is a new online service for board gamers that I’m developing - Read more about the vision here)

I’ve been testing the engine with fairly cursory data up to this point, plugging in some test data, seeing it crunch some figures, send a few emails, then trash the data to start again.  As of Sunday I actually put through a real scenario and watched it do it’s magic!  Worked a charm.

The Engine

So what does the engine have to do?  Well there’s a few things involved, mostly taking the original data and transposing it into the correct format to allow us to render the pages correctly.  There’s a heck of a lot of server-side validation I’ve had to write to ensure the state engine is created in the correct format.  This is where the majority of the development effort has been spent - trying to get the data in and out of the database in the right format, and rendering all the various possible states that the engine supports for each specific game.

Virality and Magnetism

Originally the game engine showed it’s status immediately, which was great to see up front.  But my original plan was to include elements to help generate magnetism and virality - two buzz words that we picked up whilst developing smartgroups.com a few years back. 

Virailty is as it sounds - getting current users of the site to get more users involved in a sort of snowball effect (passing on to others like a virus!). 

Magnetism on the other hand, gets existing users of the site to come back and interact with the site (effectively pulling users back to the site like a magnet!)

These two elements effectively make a site sticky - just like facebook for example, this is mainly acheived through email notification and other cool psychological tricks to make people want to do more on the site (ever seen those little notes next forum postings that say how many posts you’ve made and give you a rating?).

So after building the engine end-to-end originally, I then decoupled it, to add some magnetism and virality into the engine.  This hopefully helps solves some automated-marketing of the site which is all good given it’s a hobby site!

Wahoo!

It’s a great feeling to know that the most important chunk of development is now complete.  So okay there’s still plenty to do, but seeing your idea working and validated gives you a certain amount of pride.  This also means that all future work is working on data that isn’t necssarily fudged or made-up to fit the purpose.

Next Steps

Next on the development roadmap is the user’s area - Your Home where you can register, setup your profile, manage your personal data, interact with the social side of the site and importantly plugin to the games engine…

After that, I’ll then work on the social side of the site, as well as integrating some third party forum software to allow site users to build up a bit of community.  Then we should be ready for a bit of beta testing.

It’s still a bit of an unknown how much people will want to use the site.  With the viral elements, and the nature of board gamers, it certainly has the potential to avalanche into someting that a lot of gamers will want to use - (so will be interesting to see the site scale or not…) but who knows?

Looking forward to getting it out there!

Cheers,
-Dan

 P.S. At least I can stop using the Train Cliche for the games engine on my blog postings now!  Gotta be happy with that 

Posted by Dan on Mon May 26th, 2008 at 7:31 pm and is filed under Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

• Posted on 26th May 2008 |
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