Matt Mehlhope - Page 3

Diablo 3 Preview by The New York Times

Diablo 3 Preview by the New York Times

I’m a huge fan of reading gaming-oriented articles on The New York Times for a variety of reasons, but mostly because there is always a particular spin to give gaming some “credit” to an audience that may not otherwise care. In your typical game preview, such as those of IGN or elsewhere, the author will divulge all the gory details of the experience and reference a plethora of other popular titles while creating a comparison of mechanics and the developer’s prowess in their execution. The New York Times, on the other hand, often makes no reference to other titles and instead relates the workings of a game to more audience-oriented references, such as businesses and world events.

Once Diablo III arrives, millions of players will generate items of randomized treasure every day. That can make eBay look like a flea market.

Notice the author did not say, “That can make World of Warcraft’s auction house look like a flea market.”

On a separate notion, major publishers and studios are often immediately introduced as “game changing,” “massively profitable,” or in this case, “world’s most accomplished and prestigious developer.” Why? Because you need to give the audience a reason to read an article they may not necessarily find interesting otherwise. No matter what industry you’re interested in, if you follow business you’re always interested in who is doing what the best and how they are doing it — a perfect way to entice NYT readers to a video game article. The New York Times’s angle is not a bad thing by any means, it’s just significantly different from the rest of the “video game review and preview” sites out there — and to be honest, it’s a nice change of pace.

Diablo 3 is a title that almost any nostalgic gamer can be intensely excited about and from my experience at BlizzCon 2010, we’re all in for a treat. Read the Diablo 3 Preview by The New York Times here.

April 26, 2011

Associating Endorphins with Advertising

“Achievements” have become ubiquitous in modern-day games as they are an almost dastardly way for developers to attract gamers into playing their titles longer by providing a more complete emotional and psychological experience. While the research is somewhat incomplete, achievements have been shown in studies to trigger the release of endorphins in a player’s brain, which not only provides a good feeling, but allows for a psychological addiction to take root. Having hoards of people addicted to something you have created — in a legal form no less — is a coveted ability that has been held close by the gaming industry…until now.

Kiip is a new startup created by Brian Wong that associates the positive emotions and psychological addiction of achievements with brands. As players earn achievements within their games, they also earn special promotions and bonuses from an advertiser at that exact moment. The result? An extremely powerful platform that allows advertisers to nearly guarantee that their product, service, or overall brand will have a positive association with the consumer. Having your brand’s promotion appear at the exact time endorphins are released into the consumer’s brain is the proverbial equivalent of injecting them with a small dose of heroin every time they see your logo.

Assuming the target demographic matches, there is little reason for Kiip to not be a staple on any brand manager’s list of platforms to advertise on.

Companies have worked for years to polish their brand and create positive emotions with consumers, but never has a company had the ability to do such alongside a proven psychological tool. It will be most intriguing the see the evolution of this associative advertising and if successful it may not be long before companies attempt to invade our bedrooms too.

April 17, 2011

Website Optimization — Part 2: CSS/JS Reduction and Minimizing

In part 1 I explored how combining your various images into CSS sprites can improve site load time by leaps and bounds, but we are far from done when it comes to optimizing a site that gets as much traffic as Boss Blueprint. Keep in mind that optimization is great for any size site, but that small amounts of bloat become large problems with enough traffic. If you want, crank the jam below to get in the mood for some good ole’ fashioned web hackery.

Removing Unnecessary Parts of jQuery UI’s CSS

While many application developers utilize jQuery UI to enhance their interfaces, they often forget to customize the included CSS for only what the application uses. With Boss Blueprint I have simple demands from jQuery UI, i.e., create some dialog boxes, resize the icons, and allow the icons to be dragged. As I do not have any future plans for a datepicker, slider, or the monstrous list of icons that are used within jQuery UI, I took the liberty of removing those lines from the CSS file.

CSS file reduction

As Google Chrome’s audit tool shows in the above image, the difference in the size of the file is significant (18KB). The reduction and removal process was repeated for the various CSS files used throughout the site, which yielded a comprehensive size reduction of 56KB.

Minimizing CSS and JS Files

To Minimize or “Minify” simply means removing unnecessary spaces and all comments from a production CSS or Javascript file. Believe it or not, spaces and comments can take up a lot of space within a file and a browser could care less about them, it just wants to know what it is supposed to display. By minifying, the overall size of the files can be reduced by as much as 80-90%.

If you want to get fancy for a truly comprehensive optimization, I would highly recommend implementing this PHP5 script that combines all of your CSS/JS files into the fewest number of files possible and minifies them. If you want something simple to use, I recommend Minify CSS and Minify JS, two great little web tools.

What’s in store for Part 3?

Part 3 of the website optimization series is probably going to be one of the most fun to write…and read! Why? Because it is all about the glorious benefits of enabling GZIP compression, explaining how it works, and why it is so damned awesome. Stay tuned!

April 11, 2011

Portal 2 Co-op Walkthrough and Comic

IGN’s 10 minute walk-through of Portal 2′s co-op mode had me nearly salivating. In an age where mediocre at best FPSs conquer the market, it’s highly exciting to see the sequel of a genuinely challenging, thoughtful, and unique IP so close to release.

What’s more, is first part of the Portal 2 comic was released, which has its own incredibly unique style and sets the context for the events experienced in the game. Click the image for the full comic.

April 10, 2011

Optimizing Boss Blueprint — Part 1

When we initially launched Boss Blueprint it was a rapid prototype that myself and my colleague had created — no optimization, no SEO, just core functionality for the sake of getting it out there quickly. A few days later the application was unexpectedly featured on WoW Insider and our traffic exploded. Fortunately, our server from (mt) held up fine and we didn’t have any outages, but we did have some mild slow downs as well as a folder of user generated images that went from 200mb to 3.5gb overnight, not to mention using a lot of unnecessary bandwidth due to the lack of optimization. In part one of this series, I’ll go into detail about some of the low-hanging-fruit that we picked for Boss Blueprint’s optimization and the excellent performance increases that resulted.

HTTP Requests and a lot of them

Since Boss Blueprint is a tool where users can create strategies for MMO games, we provide a palette of icons that are used to portray roles and direction. On the back end of this, there is a fair amount of code that creates a data object, renders the final jpeg, provides the embed code, etc. Because of the complexity, a metric fuck-ton of HTTP requests are made.

Boss Blueprint HTTP Requests Before Optimization

As you can see, 52 HTTP requests are made and the load time is still well over 1.5 seconds, even with the majority of the content being cached on a CDN (which we did not have upon release and still have not utilized fully).

We want the loading process of the actual work area to be as fast as possible, since the chances of someone going to the site to create a strategy are extremely high. With this, we favored loading the icon palette information on-load, rather than being requested after the user had selected a boss area and having to potentially wait before he or she saw the tools they could work with. As each icon was a separate file, over 20 of the HTTP requests above are for icons.

CSS Sprites to the Rescue

Luckily, http requests due to having a large number of images are easily reduced by creating a CSS sprite. I combined all of the palette icons into a single .png, optimized that .png, put it on the CDN, and thus obtained all the icon images with only one HTTP request.

Boss Blueprint HTTP Requests After Optimization

With the same amount of data being loaded (~30kb), but 22 fewer requests being made, the site’s speed increased by about 58%. Granted, the above is all after the site has been loaded at least once by the user (thus it has been cached). Such a big difference for such a small change!

In part 2 I’ll discuss how we’re decreasing jQuery’s size by 72% and the differences in production versus development CSS files.

April 6, 2011