The introduction was the part that we knew everyone was going to read, so we made an effort. We must have done it quite well because many people have told us they like it a lot… Let’s see what you think:

The project, at a glance

The Context

The web is the future.

During the last decade, the world of computers has changed completely due to the fast evolution of the biggest and most efficient communications network ever created: Internet. This evolution is blurring the edge between the classic desktop applications and the modern web, social applications. Today, there are not many reasons to develop software which does not work on this global operating system, that has almost 1500 millions of users all over the world and that is growing at a fast pace.

This is the context of our project, and we face it with the ambitious aim of innovate and stand out in this huce sea of applications that want the same.

The Idea

Since the moment in which the broadband connections made it possible, flash games portals have been extremely succesful. According to the latest data (year 2008) more than 25% of internet users play in this portals all over the world, which means that more than 300 million people. Undoubtely, this is a wide market.

On the other hand, a new kind of web applications has appeared in these last years: The social networks. The common feature of these networks is that they allow their users to establish relationships, getting to keep in touch with a lot of people.

After the horizontal social networks appeared, some new networks are focusing in one single group of users with something in common. These are the vertical social networks, and a lot of people state that these will get more popular that the horizontal ones.

A successful fusion

Knowing this, the idea of the project appeared; to combine these two successful formulas. The project consists, basically, of a flash games portal with a vertical social network for the players of the games.

Although it’s a very innovative idea, it has been easy to precise this idea… Everything seemed to fit perfectly.

Features from the flash games portals:

• Great variety of games periodically updated
• Classification of games in categories
• Games search

Features from the vertical social networks

• Frienship relationships between the users
• Communication between the users
• Groups
• Customizable character
• Creation of contents (comments, scores, etc…)

In addition, we quickly discovered that we could add a lot of innovative and attractive new features:

• High-Scores system for the games
• Competitions between the players
• Logs of game statistics
• Personalized recommendations of games

Al these features are enough theirself to make ULUland an innovative project because they create a better gaming experience for the users. But, in addition to that, after the first month of work, we came up with a new idea that fits perfectly our social and open filosophy, and makes this project become a pioneer in this field:

The developers can add their own games to the portal

The same as in YouTube, but with games.

All of the classic flash games portals worked more or less the same: The games were added by the site admins manually. The best of them had a web form or an email address so that the developers could send their games to be published, only if the site owners wanted.

This project has been developed in such a way that it allows the flash game developers to upload their creations in an extremely easy way, avoiding the disturbing process that is compulsory in other portals.

In addition, we have developed an open API so that the games can communicate with the system, get access to some information of the players, send or get data such as high scores…

There are only a few other portals that allow this.

The development

The development of this project has been very similar to a trip: We started one year ago approximately, almost without experience in web development, but with a lot of motivation and knowing that we were in the right path, developing something that could work in the real world.

At first, we used Ruby On Rails. At that moment we were studying the different options, and we had a lot of curiosity about this framework. However, we soon discovered that it had some issues.

Slightly disappointed we switched to PHP, without any framework. We tried this option for a few weeks, but we had liked the Ruby on Rails phylosophy and we discovered symfony, that a lot of people calls “The Rais for PHP”.

We soon noticed that this had been an excelent decission. The documentation was great and complete, the community huce and the framework was reliable and robust. Anyway, we needed a few time to get to master all the features of this technology.

A real project

From the beginning, one of the main motivations to spend this effort in the project was that we believed in this project, we knew it coud become a reality, successful and profitable.

We confirmed that this was not an illusion when the project was selected among more than 70 projects to participate in the SeedRocket initiative, a campus for young entrepeneurs organised by 14 important spanish entrepeneurs.

]]> http://blog.pncil.com/en/2008/10/%c2%bfque-c-estamos-haciendo/feed/ http://blog.pncil.com/en/2008/08/ululandcom-28808-registro-de-cambios-de-nueva-version/ http://blog.pncil.com/en/2008/08/ululandcom-28808-registro-de-cambios-de-nueva-version/#comments Fri, 29 Aug 2008 16:09:16 +0000 miguelSantirso http://blog.pncil.com/?p=36 Just one week after the previous version upload, we already have a new one: This eleventh alfa version is filled up with a lot of new features and improvements but in which we would highlight the “code recipes“. This new tool allows the flash game developers to upload small snippets of code. Once that snippets, or code recipes, are uploaded other users can comment, rate and, even, embed it in other external pages (yes, like the youtube videos).

Changelog summary

• Code Recipes
• Bufixes and subtle improvements
  • Permalinks
  • Remember password functionality improved
  • Fixed a bug in previews due to non-latin characters.
  • Visits counters
  • “Human” dates i18n
• Aesthetical and navigational improvements
  • New header and menus
  • New index
• Comments
  • Comments available in profiles and recipes
  • Improvements in comments’s appearance and behavior

Detailed changelog

Code Recipes

The main new feature of this version: The code recipes are small code snippets sent by the registered developers. Then, it’s possible to rate, comment and embed these recipes.

We think that this tool cand have various uses:

• Examples repository: It is a great tool to organise a lot of examples that coud be useful for other developers.
• Code highlighting: Thanks to the syntax highlighting system (admits more than 13 programming languages) and to the possibility of embed this code in other pages, it may be really useful for developers to put these code snippets in their blogs or pages.
• Tutorials: The system is flexible enough to allow developers to write a super simple snippet of one line or a full tutorial with several programming languages involved.
• Feedback: Thanks to the comments and the ratings, it will be very enriching for developers due to the possible corrections and suggestion of other users.

Supported languages

Bugfixes and subtle improvements

Permalinks

Now we use permalinks in URLs instead of plain titles.

“Remember me” function improved

The new version authenticates the user in the moment he arrives. In previous versions the system waited until the user tried to use a protected feature.

Fixed a bug in previews due to non-latin characters

Sometimes, we also make newbie mistakes. Only sometimes.

Visits counters

The visits are now counted and shown in the profiles, the collaboration offers and the flash code recipes.

“Human” dates internationalization

Perhaps you didn’t notices, but the whole application is i18n ready. This week we have started to translate the dates in “human” format (those like “one day ago”).

Aesthetical and navigational improvements

New header and menus

The navigation system of the header was one of the things that we wanted to improve. We think that we made a good job here:

This new header shows the user where he is and reduces de number of clicks to move from one page to other.

Index

We have improved slightly the index page:

Also, we added a small badge for the signed in users. It shows a few stats about his activity:

Comments

Possibility to comment in code recipes and in profiles.

URLs

New URL

We have changed the url of the flash game developers area to developers.ululand.com.

Friendly URLs

We have adjusted all the urls to make them friendly to both the user and the search engines.

Aesthetical and navigatonal improvements

We have changed a lot the visual aspect of the developers area, thinking in make it more attractive and more comfortable.

Colours

We have lightened up the colours, trying to make it less disturbing for your eyes.

Main menu reestructured

We have changed the main menu, merging the main options “People” and “Community”.

I want to point out that this menu is exactly the same that the one in the gamers area.

Dynamic title

The title changes automatically according to the url. It helps the user to know where he is and is very useful to navigate back.

Developer Profiles

Gravatar

The application shows now the Gravatar of every user automatically.

Tags

Developers can autotag themselfs now.

Description

Developers can now add their description in their profiles. As usual in ululand, it is possible to use Markdown to format the text easily.

Search, similar developers and tags search

Now it’s much easier to navigate through registered developers.

Collaboration offers

This is something that was asked by several developers.

Description with Markdown

The description of the collaboration offers admits Markdown.

Tags

Keeping in line with our phylosophy, we wanted to maintain things simple so the only way to organise the offers is by tags.

This tags are used to show suggested collaboration offers to the developers and viceversa.

Comments

It is possible to comment in the collaboration offers. This comments admit Markdown.

We are already making some plans for the project that we will try to present to the fast game development compo. We are also game developers, not only web developers!

At first, we thought of ludixgames.com, but we discarded it when we discovered ludics.com. Then, we tried with a few more, but none of them was free. Finally, the day before the presentation in front of the potential investors, we found ululand.com, which we liked and was free. It is “the land of the ulus“, being the ulus, the personalizable avatars (which are really cool!) that we commented some time ago.

So, the project will be called from now ululand, but who knows… Maybe, in the future, we will change our mind and we will choose a new name.

We are so tired that we can’t even write a post to explain all the experiences that we lived in the SeedRocket, at Barcelona. ¡But we will! We have so much to tell… Until then, you can read the posts I wrote in my personal blog these days (sorry, only in spanish!): http://miguelsantirso.es/etiqueta/seedrocket/.

It seems that this first phase consists of several intensive classes and some meetings with the experts to create an “action plan”. After eight days, they will select three projects to stay four months more working on it, with 20.000 euros to spend.

Obviously, we are incredibly proud of this (it’s always nice to be chosen among almost 70 projects…), but we also know that it is going to be really hard to make it into the final phase.

Anyway, we think that this confirms that we are working in a very good idea, and that it can succeed. nibiru has won a lot today!

Here you can watch the video. It’s in spanish… sorry:

SeedRocket is an initiative founded by a group of entrepeneurs, experimented business angles and Risk Capital inversors from Europe, experts, tutors, …, that have joined together to help to create new teams and projects that are related to the New Technologies during their initial phases, the hardest ones.

That is how SeedRocket is defined by their organisers. At first, 15 teams will be chosen to assist to an intensive campus in Barcelona. From that 15 projects, they will choose 3 that will stay there for 4 months, working in the project with an economic help of 20.000 euros. Everything under the control of several experts.

The truth is that this seems to us a great chance for our project nibiru. The bad thing is that we have had very few time to prepare it and we have sent it in a bit precipitate way.

As we know that the most of you don’t know what nibiru is, you can watch or download the presentation that we sent to SeedRocket to show and defend our project:

Download presentation of nibiru for SeedRocket (spanish, pdf, 400KB)

We are really excited with the possibility of being chosen (though we know that it will be very hard). We will know it in four or five days!