This weekend I updated GamerScoreGoal(GSG) with my latest code. It didn't change much visually from the version that has been online for the last month, but there are a lot of improvements in the back end. This project has really been teaching me a lot about myself as a programmer. Mostly that I don't have much experience in creating UI and that I love working in databases.
Last month I planned on feature freezing the back end and forcing myself to work on the UI. That didn't work out. I found myself stuck with a bunch of half finished designs that I didn't like. So I ending up working on a few new database features.
I already had a list of games that I track and looking around Xbox related sites/forums I saw a need for a system to rate the difficultly of an achievement. The first task was to get and store the achievement list for each game. My first thought was allow users to rate each achievement and leave it at that. That seems like an awfully manual process and until I reach a critical mass of active users it was going to be completely useless. So I decided that if I know the number of users that have that achievement I can compare that to the number of users that have played the game and at least get a percentage. That's what I'm displaying now, just a simple percentage of the players that have earned that achievement. So even with a very small sample of gamers it at least gets the achievements ranked in a general order of difficultly. Here is a sample: Halo 3 achievements with difficulty.
I'll be getting a full copy of Visual Studio 2008 soon so I'm contemplating migrating to .NET 3.5 to take advantage of LINQ and the new HTML/CSS design tools. GSG was first prototyped in VS2008 beta2 and I knew I wanted to transfer over to 2008 as soon as I could get my hands on a full copy. I know the evaluation version is out now and I've got a copy of that but I just don't feel safe migrating the project until I have a full non-expiring version on all my dev machines.
I feel I need to come up with a simple road map for the dev of GSG. I have a vision of what features a 0.9 version of the site will have. But I don't have a clue of what the site will look like visually. So unless there is graphic's designer out there that wants to work for free and is interested in this project I'm in for a lot of work and growth.