i'm calling it - the Giant Bomb metagame metagame (teaser)
By takua108 35 Comments
ALSO, CHECK OUT THE NEW, SUPER EXTRA FANCY URL: http://imcalling.it
Hello, Giant Bomb userbase. So it's been like six months since Giant Bomb's quest system is in place, and by now the initial appeal of quests has pretty much worn off. Many users ignore quests entirely, and I can't even count the number of times quest devotees like myself have been disappointed to see extra XP from community quest challenges go to waste because not enough people complete them!
Less than a month after the quest system was implemented, I pretty much started to anticipate this. I realized that the problem going forward would be that, while it's fun to do the quests at the time, you don't really have much to show for completing them afterwards. Levels and XP are pretty much significant everywhere on the website but the box in the corner that shows you your own level. So I got to thinking about how I could craft a web game thing around the Giant Bomb quest system.
I hadn't worked on a website in ages, but I whipped out Notepad++, re-installed XAMPP, and began work on some PHP for the first time in a couple years. I wrote a tiny little bit of code that extracted any given user's current XP total from their quest page, and from there ideas formed left and right. I played around with a few of them before eventually settling on one:
What if you could bet on how well a game is going to review on Giant Bomb using your Giant Bomb quest XP?
Now, about five months of on-and-off work later, and... well, I'm not done yet, by quite a ways, but I've made semi-incredible progress on...
You can poke around at what I have so far by going to http://imcalling.it, but I should warn you: there's a system in place that will prevent you from connecting your Giant Bomb account to ici, at least for now. Why? Well, because I'm constantly working on the game on and off during my spare time, and it's not really in a usable state yet. You can place bets on games, but I'm still working out the bugs in the system that resolves the bets once the game is released. I'm also working on the system that checks to make sure that the game you're trying to place a bet on hasn't been released yet in North America, as well as a ton of other stuff. I'll make a new thread in a month or so when I'm (hopefully) done.
So yeah, that's about it. Any questions, comments, concerns, criticisms, or ideas?