A faster user experience & How to promote?
I've just finished designing the 'Users', 'Phases', 'Races' and 'Drivers' tables in Microsoft SQL Server 2008. This means we can get people signed up to Dream F1 2010 very shortly even though there is, technically speaking, no game yet. The difference between a site that people can actually get signed up to and a holding page promising one day we'll return is HUGE. Time to get the hope back!
If it's one thing people lose patience with faster than anything else in life, it's waiting for web pages to load. ASP.NET 3.5 is a tasty technology that I've been toying with since mid-2009 and when done properly it gives a quick user experience with the brunt of the processing being done back at the server rather than all in your own web browser with scripts containing thousands of lines. The results are fast page-load times with smooth transitions that are very pleasing and should keep users coming back. People love to give Microsoft a hard time but I honestly can't think of this project being easier, more logical or quicker on any other platform. Stored procedures will also feature so that the SQL Server does all of the database update work with the bonus side-effect of being more secure as the database modification instructions aren't contained in the pages the users see.
I've been spending all afternoon tossing around ideas in my head on how to make Dream F1 more popular than it ever was before. What's the point writing all this fancy stuff with a brilliant user experience if we don't have any users? What did we do before? Well, we couldn't (and still can't) afford to advertise so we relied on the kindness of the folks over at Alpha F1 and Gametribe to promote us. This had limited appeal and both communities died out in the mid 2000's. Twitter creates a free way to promote and quickly connect with people who know you exist but, again, it's quite hard to get a fan base without having another medium in which people can find out about your presence on Twitter such as radio, magazines/newspapers or television.
That's when it hit me.
Facebook Application. The API and documentation is free, it's supported in Microsoft development environments and MILLIONS of people can search the term 'F1', find us and tell everybody they network with about us. We wouldn't be drowning in a sea of similar apps either which fills me with hope. It would be nice to launch this by 2011 after somewhat of a provisional season so we've got a service worth shouting about.
Dream F1 2010 looks like it'll be returning back to its roots with a pure prediction game and then we'll have a LIVE PROTOTYPE where all signed up users get to play with, test and bug-report on the a new game that will be more like an F1 management sim. Hopefully it'll be advanced enough to become the main Dream F1 game by the 2011 season. This was the original plan for 2006 but this time we mean business. Better late than never. Exciting things to come...
