Ever since the 80s and 90s days of Sierra On-line’s “Quest” games, I’ve been a big fan of PC and Console RPGs. Cinematics and crisp graphics add to the fun fo the game, but the exploration of the world, and the unravelling of a good story are the two main things that keep me going back to the genre.

About two months ago I joined twitter. I honestly only wanted to follow the local sports writers, and possibly interact with some of my friends. Soon after that I expanded to following Stargate actors. Then I got the idea that I could market myself a little better in case I needed to find a new job really quick, or wanted to pick up some freelance work.

I began to follow everyone who was following @VoodooPuppy, a game developer, experience designer, story-teller, and ruler of worlds. Oh yah, they also like gummy bears. I was following 500, then 800, and made my way up to 1500. I noticed that lots of people started following me back. Some were normal people, others were marketing companies, the rest were anything you can imagine. Something I did notice, people were starting to respond.

I’m now followed by almost 700 people. I have a few regulars that I interact with. We all started discovering that we had similar interests. After that, we found out we liked the same video game genres. We started talking about RPGs, JRPGs, and finally started swapping game titles and companies around.

That’s when I decided to compliment @mistwalker on a fine job with Lost Odyssey, an RPG for the Xbox 360. To my surprise, Mr. Sakaguchi himself responded. It was exciting to make a connection with someone who I’ve admired for so long.

There are now six of us that are starting to tweet daily. We’ve even moved into the direction of doing a little Zork styled RPGing with a new hash ‘#twitterpg’. We tossed around a few ideas, sat undecided, and @mistwalker cast the final vote to go with it. A new age in tweeting was born.

Currently, us six adventurers have just slain a mighty beast with our bare hands, and are deciding which bridge to take. I can see myself, @bendavischicago, @RogerReinhardt, @Dan_Tsukasa, @DawnRivers, and @mistwalker looking around this world. It is our’s for the taking, and we’re marching forward into the unknown to battle evil, save the world, and live as heroes.

I now invite you all to start using and following this hash. While we may not be ready to pickup another adventurer quite yet, 140 characters go quickly, I am interested in what other worlds people will come up with, and what adventures you will embark on. As I sit here on my porch on a mild late summer night, I can see the hash in the trend area in the near future. There are thousands of people tweeting and exploring virtual worlds running through our minds.

Imagine the stories that will come out of all of this. An innocent exchange of tweets praising a genre, complimenting a designer, new twitter friendships coming to life, and it is now ballooning into something more. A creative exchange building new personalities and places, inspired by the greatest games ever written.

I invite you all to partake. Form your party. Set a course. Launch your adventure. #twitterpg is your’s for the taking.

Dan Joseph is the CEO and head of Software Engineering of Familiaris Games.

Aside from my personal flash game projects, I am collaborating with Ben Davis on multiple future 
projects, and writing the story and script for an upcoming AAA level RPG, modelled after the same 
type of game play you see in Lost Odyssey, Final Fantasy, and other Japanese-based RPGs.  When 
I'm not developing games, I'm working as a Web Developer on various major brand web sites.

You can follow me on twitter @iamdanjoseph.  

If you wish to contact me, please click the contact page, 
and fill out the form.  I will get back to you as soon as I can.

I realized today that I’ve pretty much disappeared on everyone. Sorry about that! Real life got in the way, and my duties as a web developer were needed 2.5x more than normal. Its been kind of fun, but stressful at many points. I’m about done though, and piece 10 of my Flash Game Dev 101 series will be released after this week.

In the meantime, I’d like to take the time to talk a little bit about HTML5 and project planning.

I recently was brought into a project to help with. It was as simple set of html/css pages. No programming. No databases. Just static pages. All the art was done, so I just had to come up with the html and css code, and let ’em loose. The only issue, they wanted it done in HTML5/CSS3.

One of the things that makes building a html5/css3 only site is Internet Explorer 8. It is still widely used, and will be for some time. Windows XP users can’t upgrade to IE9, and many of them have no interest in Firefox, Chrome, or Safari. Sure, you can download a hack, such as PIE.htc, but that doesn’t solve all the problems, and you’re still left with some quirkiness about your pages.

One of the reasons for the decision to go the html5 route was the ability to embed custom fonts into the web pages. Creative people shy away from the standard fonts so they can use “prettier” fonts, or even just something that is fresh.

I can fully understand that.

The issue we ran into was we were converting a single web site, into a new landing page web site, and then many pages embedded into a facebook application and placed on their fan page. We needed something trackable, SEOable (that has to be a word!), and so we (thought we) couldn’t just go the route of static images with links laid over the top.

Personally, I liked the idea of all of this. I still do. But looking back on it, the headaches of trying to make IE8 look right, and function right, and the client expecting things to be perfect, it just was a no-win situation for us developers.

The moral of this story. If you’re going for cutting edge, you need to understand and plan that your IE8 customers won’t see the site as you want them too. You either have to accept that, or scrap all the html5/css3 elements. Animations will have to be flash, rounded corners will have to be images, and fonts will have to be standard.

Familiars Games Update

Ben Davis and me are still working on getting our second game out the door. Ben has been patient with me while I’ve not had enough time to work on Priority Delivery, and has begun sketching out his next personal project. So far he has a winner, and he’s still working towards improving it. We’re looking at September releases for both of those games.

The story of Johnny that I’ve been talking about has moved forward a bit thanks to my iPhone’s notepad app. I’ve been writing down notes and developing characters in places such as restrooms, conference rooms before meetings, and in traffic jams when the roads are closed for a wreck (yes, this happened last week!).

Twitter

Thank you all for keeping in touch via twitter! I always thought it was a stupid platform, but have realized its power and entertainment. Thanks for following!

Video Game Endorsement

If you’re looking for a GREAT Xbox 360 game, go grab Lost Odyssey. It’s a couple years old now, and harder to find, but you can order it online if nothing else. The game has 100+ hours of game play, terrific cinematics, excellent graphics, and a strong story. The game play itself is also very good. Controls are smooth, and movement is smooth. I have put it on my personal Top 10 RPGs of all times, which I’ll be posting here on DanJoseph.me eventually.

That’s it for today!

Dan Joseph is a Software Engineer/Architect.  

You can follow him on twitter @iamdanjoseph.  

If you wish to contact him, please click the contact page, 
and fill out the form.

Every year I watch the Home Run Derby. As a baseball fan, its one of those traditions that I hope never dies, but still wish they’d revert to the previous format. Still, I found myself in amazement at one more thing they’ve found to improve on technologically. This year they’re showing graphical tags of how far the ball traveled where it lands.

I don’t think I’m amazed personally at what they’re doing, or how they’re showing it. I’m amazed that sports has come this direction. There are so many purists in the broadcast booths today that I’m amazed they even let them run a radar gun or show instant replay.

Tagging home runs isn’t the only thing they’ve started doing this year. A couple days ago I watched a special on FSN Detroit about the angle of the bat in relation to how far the ball will travel, and where it will land. Have we really come to the point in pro sports where we have to condition our players to understand the angle they’re swinging the bat? Do we really need to be that intricate to squeeze 10 more feet out of a hit?

And let’s not forget the Pitchers. They have people on staff with some ball clubs now to analyze the movement of the pitcher, and push them to the very brink of where the body can handle the hard jarring motion of a pitch. Imagine if Nolan Ryan had this type of guy working on his motion. 105-108 MPH could have turned into 115-118 MPH.

But does it really need to come to this? Have we focused too much on technology? I think in some cases we have. I understand the desire to want to strike out more people, or get more multibase hits, but I also understand why the purists want to keep it a game, and not evolve us into machines.

There is an episode of The Twilight Zone called “Steel”. Simply put, Boxing is an outlawed sport for humans. You must use a robot. These robots are stronger and more durable, and there are different models to upgrade to. If we keep overusing technology in sports, could this become reality? Quite possibly.

Still, even if you’re not a fan of over technologing (is that a word??) sports, you have to admit, some of the byproducts are exciting to watch. We all love to see the 100 MPH fast ball, and there is nothing more exciting than the triple. I just hope this doesn’t saturate that excitement.

Here’s some news stories I found interesting today…

Google+ has its minuses

I can’t imagine why anyone would write a negative article on something that is enjoyable, let alone one about an incomplete social network. C-Net’s Jessica Dolcourt does a good job breaking down the aspects of Google+, but it gives an early looker a false sense of what Google+ will evolve into. Maybe you’ll agree with some of it, but I’d keep an open mind.

Secret Service uses Twitter to find bike mechanic

I have no words for this. I am speechless. Just read it…

Finaly Fantasy XIII-2 Screenshots

I loved Final Fantasy XIII. If you’re a fan of RPGs, and haven’t played it yet, you should. I am looking forward to XIII-2. The early reviews and screenshots are very promising that Square won’t repeat another X-2 debacle.

Comic Con 20111 Coverage

I’ve never been into comics, but recently read the first 3 Jericho Season 3 comics. I really enjoyed them. Aside from the fact that I’m thinking about looking for a new Comic series, this is the 2nd biggest gaming event of the year. This is also a great look at some Sci-Fi.

Finally, congratulations to Robinson Cano, 2011 HR Derby Champion. He didn’t use technology. Just a bat.

It isn’t often I take up some blog space to brag about myself in the past. Today I had a phone call from someone interested in one of my past projects, TeaserLeague.com.

Teaser League is a game that I often describe as a football survival pool with a team based rotisserie element to it. Aside from the sports element, there was a lot of database and back end architecture that I got to contribute to the project:

• Database Design
• Database Performance Tuning
• Automation Process for standings, new membership, and real-time NFL scores.

One of my favorite resources for tuning our MySQL database was the MySQL Performance Blog. They have a lot of information on just about any topic you need. For us, it was how to make the database run as fast as possible, with a lot of heavy queries, and a lot of simultaneous connections. We were gearing up for a 250,000 member web site, with most everyone active all day Sunday.

I had my first chance at writing production C code. We decided to write our first breed of automation scripts in C in an attempt to pull the most performance possible out of our linux servers. I didn’t know Python, and C seemed a better route than Perl. Nothing against Perl, but we could have just as easily used PHP, and not accomplished what we wanted. I should note that in the end, we had mostly PHP scripts, and just a couple C scripts pushing the back end.

Another aspect that I really enjoyed was the chance to interact with the community. I was asked if I would handle our social media aspects, and setup a Facebook fan page and a Twitter account for the site. I pushed those pretty good, and built a pretty decent following. I was even able to get Ochocinco to read one my responses to him, but couldn’t get him to RT me. My guess is he was restricted from anything that resembled a gambling site, even though we were for entertainment only.

I miss working with a community. It was a nice break form the hectic and sometime grueling task of coding. I’m still working on getting LivingPoetic.com up and running, and hope to break back into some community management this fall.

Speaking of social networking, I could use a few followers in Twitter. Please follow me: @iamdanjoseph — I promise I’ll follow back.