jimgreer

Male enhancement!

Seriously it was the same thing ivankirigin said - what's the worst that can happen?

We actually did the same thing for Kongregate. Except we gave out an invite code to everyone who asked - usually same day. So the artificial scarcity was... artificial. But if we'd had a big problem we could have stopped the invites.

We did that for about two months and then took the invite barrier down. Worked for us.

edit: I forgot the second half of this story. A few months after we took the invite barrier down, we decided to do a "Hollywood" launch - really all we were doing was changing the "alpha" to "beta" and releasing some new features (earning cards by playing games). It worked, we got lots of press. Fox News even called and asked if I could go on their afternoon cable show. I did (here's the video - http://tinyurl.com/2gpz7x). Our site immediately cratered - it was a much, much bigger surge than Digg. We got it back up in about 20 minutes and the follow on traffic was good as well.

So I guess we did a hybrid Gmail/Hollywood.

Is anyone here using New Relic RPM? The demo looks slick. We're currently doing things a little more adhoc for Kongregate. Just using pl_analyze - http://rails-analyzer.rubyforge.org/pl_analyze/

Yes. And vans are more commodious (and therefore better) than cars.

Actually one of the most interesting things at RailsConf was MagLev, which applies the GemStone object persistence engine to Ruby. Apparently there are some pretty big Smalltalk apps out there using GemStone. http://chadfowler.com/2008/6/5/maglev and http://ruby.gemstone.com/

There's this one too - http://hoptoadapp.com/welcome.

Haven't tried either one yet.

I missed this too - I think putting a little play arrow next to the "+" is in order.

Other than that, I love it.

As the company grows, the extra friction on communications between the two locations becomes more of a problem. My company, Kongregate, has 10 people in San Francisco and 5 in Portland, Oregon. We make it work through all the methods you describe, but the couple of weeks a year when we all gather in the same place are definitely easier.

(shameless plug) - If you are an achievement addict try it on my site - http://www.kongregate.com/games/Scarybug/chronotron

This could do for games what Dreamweaver and FrontPage did for web authoring - sweet!

I hate to be the naysayer on this, but I disagree. An ugly MySpace page is interesting because your friends are on it. A bad game your friend made is still just a bad game.

People who are talented enough to make good web games already have a tool to do it with - Flash (typically a pirated version). It's not a perfect tool, but it's very flexible.

I agree that the physics in this thing look great though.

Looks pretty cool, and the physics are a nice touch. Honestly though, I'm pretty skeptical about people being able to create much of a variety of games unless they can do basic scripting. Still, there's a lot of 'remix this game' possibilities.