It's a good season for console gaming! Dynasty Warriors Gundam 2, Godfather 2, inFamous, Prototype, Assasin's Creed 2, another Ratchet and Clank game... Granted some of those aren't coming out for a while still.

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Web usability design patterns don't apply only to the web. Imagine a world where nothing needed instructions, all actions were completed with a minimum number of steps, and you got non-intrusive feedback for everything.

It's becoming a more popular internet design pattern to have the "submit" action on a form done with an actual button and the "cancel" action is done with a plain link. This draws attention to the more often used element.

I was in the elevator and someone was coming. The "open door" and "closed door" buttons have different symbols in every elevator. In my morning, caffeine depraved brain, I couldn't translate the images fast enough to hold the doors and since my focus was on the buttons, I didn't think to throw out an arm to stop the door. I tell myself this happens common enough and I'm not an idiot.

The "open door" button should be different than all other buttons on the elevator's interface. When you get in the elevator, there's no rush to hit the button for your floor. If you're impatient, you can mash the button to close the door. Opening the door (and I suppose the emergency buttons) is the only action that you might hit unexpectedly.

If only all things were as easy and modular as web programming. Imagine if only Otis and ThyssenKrupp could change their button coding in one place and magically all their elevators in the world would be updated. Larger, colored "open doors" buttons everywhere!

So I'm making a game. Finally.

My first plan was to build it for the iPhone. But iPhone apps are written in Objective-C (I theoretically know C and C++, but haven't used either since college), written on the Mac (I've had mine for 2 years but rarely use it), and deployed out through the iTunes Store's processes (third thing to learn). All those new bits to learn aren't bad, but it's overwhelming to start. $300 later I abandoned the iPhone app idea.

But I've been playing MafiaWars a LOT on Facebook. It's an AJAX heavy PHP game. So I thought, "what if I target Facebook?" More users than the iPhone and I could write the app in ColdFusion and/or Flex. So I'm going down that road now. The security's built in, so easy to add an app, and easier to turn into money. Give the game for free, pay to enhance it. Versus the iPhone where you build the game, then strip it down for a free demo, then have add ons for bonus in game points or something.

ColdSpring, ColdBox, Illudium generated code... squee!

And though I don't have as much free time to code as I might like (see all the WoW posts), I'm liking CF front end programming more than Flex again. It's fast, you don't have to recompile the whole thing and drill back to what you were testing, very easy to push out partial updates (opposed to having the whole app in a few swfs). Before getting back into CF like I have lately, if forced to make the decision, I'd give up CF before Flex, but now it's the other way around. I'd forgotten why I love the language!

Warning! WoW post!

3.1 drops today! I'm still debating my dual specs. I'm a pally tank, but have some really nice holy gear form 25 man content. I have no real experience healing though. So I'm debating... Two prot specs, or prot/holy? There are a few viable prot specs with different useages. After doing this research, I think I'll go with the main tank and solo specs. I'm working on old stuff, questing in BC and classic WoW content to boost my quest completion total. Once I get my quest acheievements, I'll likely change the solo spec to holy.

Prot (main tank)

If you're the main tank... You're getting big heals, taking a lot of damage, your damage output doesn't matter, and nothing can happen to make your drop aggro. This gives Spiritual Attunement as well as Guarded by the Light for super mana regen but no raid damage soaking. Pre-3.1, the damage soak went with my Divine Shield, which drops aggro, so with few exceptions, I wouldn't use, but with the split, it might be useful for the tank to soak raid damage. Also puts two points into Improved Judgements, which is generally frowned upon, but from practice, I don't have a spell rotation when tanking, I just hit whatever's up and always keep Holy Shield up.

http://ptr.wowhead.com/?talent=sVZEhxA0uMGsIufdxb

Prot (solo)

For soloing... You're doing all the damage, taking all the damage, getting no heals. No Spiritual Attunement, no Divinity, no raid damage soaking. Picks up Reckoning and goes into ret a little more.

http://ptr.wowhead.com/?talent=sVZVhxA0ughsIufdxs

Prot (off tank)

If you're offtanking... Or maybe you're DPSing. Like in Thaddius in Naxx. You need to be able to tank the first two adds, but one else is taking Thadd. You'll be soaking raid damage and DPSing. Assumes you won't be using Righteous Fury. I always have to turn it off when I'm off tanking or I'll pull aggro. Gives you the raid damage soaking and drops Reckoning to go deeper in the ret tree.

http://ptr.wowhead.com/?talent=sVZVhtVduMhsIufdtsMo

Don't want to use the talent already present in your company?

Do you enjoy purchasing new and non-applicable software if the sales pitch is convincing enough?

Want to burn this year's budget to ensure financing doesn't cut back your funds for next year?

Like having "all your eggs in one basket"?

There's only one solution!

Outsource!

You still won't have the talent and will be screwed when it comes time for maintenance after the outsourced resource is gone. But your immediate needs will be satisfied! Or they may not, but your financial balances will be close to zero. Thus justifying the cost savings from the 150 people you just laid off!

...

...

Yes, I'm bitter.

After playing iMob (a rip off of MafiaWars from Facebook) on my iPhone, I figured it can't be that hard to make a game for the iPhone. I've posted before about game ideas and now am wondering if the iPhone would be a better platform than the web browser. It's a smaller audience, but there's no worries of browsers and version and JavaScript being turned off and to start making money, just add features and release a 99cent version. So another aspect of most games has been lingering in my mind... DEATH!

Any game with combat or platforming or a timed objective has a "game over" or "death". And many games (or rather, game genres) have different ways to handle it. Some have you restart the level or from the last checkpoint. Some have you reload the last save. MMORPGs all handle it differently. World of Warcraft damages your equipped items by 10% and makes you run as a spirit back to your body. Asheron's Call 2 would make you run back to your body naked AND give you XP debt. City of Heroes just has the XP debt. The Realm would have you randomly drop some items (for anyone else in the room to take) and lose a percentage of your total XP, up to a certain number of levels lost.

So what's the best? The City of Heroes XP debt was the reason I quit the game. Losing your gear made death a VERY bad thing in The Realm. I certainly like WoW's method the most, but running back to your body as a spirit wouldn't apply in a game without a big map. It has to be enough of an annoyance that you'll avoid dying, but not so much that you'll give up on the game. In iMob when you die at level 5, you lose 5 XP, the equivalent of 25 minutes of doing missions. I uninstalled the game as soon as I saw that.

It's also important that the death handling in a game fit into the feel of the rest of the game. If my game involves zombies and you're the zombie master and you die fighting a lich, your surviving minions could drag you back to the lair. And if all your minions are dead, what then? Once you're back at the lair, what will your zombie minions do to revive you, and at what cost?

5-man "raids". 5-man heroics you can finish in about a half hour. 10- and 25-man Naxxramas take hours. I want 5-man content that takes hours, that isn't just a million trash pulls. I have a 5-person group that I love to play with. But bring in another 5 people and you lose the intimate feeling and scheduling and personality conflicts arise. I know that having a larger number of people allows for more variety. Bosses can hit harder because you have more healers... They can do stacking debuffs on the tank because you won't just have the one... The raid can split into teams across the room to deal with different things... I'll take any level of difficulty, but a 5-man dungeon that took hours to clear would be a lot of fun.

I didn't realize my slow decline at work until last Monday. Monday we had a meeting and two hours later I was emailed a ton of materials that one person just whipped up. That used to be me. I used to get back from a meeting and crank out deliverables and prototypes. What happened?

My current excuse: I'm working on six different projects simultaneously, 3 have a hard 12/1 deadline (really 11/26 with the holiday), and I change between them 20 times a day.

I was surprised at how stable the Warcraft servers were this weekend. I sat in login queues of over 800 but once on, other than a few lag spikes, things were good. Quest competition wasn't as bad as I expected either. Tankisaurus, my pally tank, is 90% through level 74 and I've cleared 5 of the new dungeons.

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So my team wants a "Flex and AIR rawkstar". Someone to fly in, throw down an app or two, revolutionize our development mythologies*, but looking through these resumes, I wonder if such a person exists. This is my first chance to be a part of the hiring process from the other side. And if nothing else, I've learned some great tips for building my own resume. I skipped the list of "technologies and stuff I know". People are listing Flex 3, then in their experience they don't mention ever writing a line of code. Writing CFCs and business logic for a site with a Flex front end doesn't mean you can put Flex on your resume. So I skip right to the experience sections.

One resume says "Worked with CFQUERY, CFUPDATE, and CFSTORED PROC for database manipulation". What about CFSET and CFBEER? Yeah, we skipped that one. And yes, there's a space in cfstored proc, apparently. "Used CFTry CFCatch to trap errors..." more tags in the resume. Say that you wrote in explicit error handling, don't say how you did it.

"Wrote modules for header and footer templates and called them all over the site using CFInclude". Okay, for real, stop capitalizing tags like that. Including a header/footer is sooooo trivial. Reading this in the resume makes me think "they think that's impressive? buh bye"

How many years of experience do you say you have for each bit of technology? I worked on Oracle for 9 months, but haven't touched it in 3 years. I've been using CF primarily just to talk between Flex and SQL Server for two years, but have been using it in some fashion for almost 7 years.

The CONSTANT misspellings are killer. It's "ColdFusion", it hasn't been "Cold Fusion" since version 2 and was never "Coldfusion" nor "Cold fusion". 4 years ago I went through a contract house and my agent went through my resume highlighting things and messed up a lot of my technical terms like this. I'll blame those agent-types, but they need to stop, they're making their client look like they don't know what they're working with.

Another resume lists off a half dozen sites s/he** worked on, that's good. But they're all extranets that require login to do or see anything. Don't include links to those.

References to internal systems...? If I said on my resume "Streamlined interfaces to VIDS", would you hire me? Now if I say "Streamlined interfaces to company's internal chargeback and budgeting system", maybe.

DO NOT MENTION FRONT PAGE!!! If you're a real web developer, you don't use Front Page. You never used Front Page. You hate Front Page and are glad it's dead. You can't say "Front Page" without spitting on the ground. Do you design web applications in Word, too? Saying "Designed and developed user interfaces with Front Page" is like "Preformed brain surgery with Playskool's Little Doctor tools". Maybe you can remove the tumor, but imagine the gory mess you'll make.

Include a web site link to your example work. And if it's a locked down site, take screen shots of what you can. I was really impressed with one resume that included a link to the guy's site. But then I go to the site and it's basically a slide show of index pages of, I would guess, site's he's touched. I don't know, it's just the slide show. No other links or text.

*That was a typo, but it works, I'll keep it

**Only one of the 10 resumes here have Anglo-Saxon names. I can't pronounce them, much less know if it's male or female. Nothing at all against Indian developers, but I'm already imagining a strong language barrier.