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Peter Bhat Harkins
Announcing NearbyGamers
I’d like to invite you all to check out my newest project, NearbyGamers, a service for tabletop gamers to find other players. (As I mentioned earlier, it’s a Rails site.) It’s for people who play RPGs, CCGs, TCGs, wargames, board games -- basically any game where you need to have a live human on the other side of a table if you want to play.
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Basically it’s the mashup of a wiki and Google Maps, and I plan to add forums (there are very few things gamers like more than arguing online). I’ve been hacking at it on and off for a couple months now, and it’s finally worth talking about. NG is my first large Rails project, and it’s been a lot of fun. Almost all the time the code is quite dense and beautiful, but several times I’ve worked up some fairly ugly hackish code I’m not particularly happy with. And then a few days later an nice, friendly little solution will pop into my head, and it’s easy to hack in because I have comprehensive tests. (Having tests has really saved my life. I’ll be posting more about it, but for now I’ll just say that I couldn’t have built NG without automated tests.)
Some of the early beta testers are computer game fans, so there’s a fair number of computer games listed on NearbyGamers right now -- heck, World of Warcraft is the most popular tag. I don’t see what folks will get out of it, but I’d rather build a pretty open system and let folks find new uses.
So check it out, let me know what you think. I’ve got a todo list online for the curious, and I’m always taking suggestions.