Sadly, with 2011 underway and our attention on new projects, it is time for the Planbeast to pack up and move on. This service will be shut down tomorrow (Sunday, Feb 13) at 6 pm Eastern.
Thanks to everyone who tried it out and gave us feedback.
My presentation about Planbeast to the Boston Indies group (a monthly gathering of folks interested in independent and small-studio video game development) -- which I mentioned last month -- happened this past Monday. The slides are now online, in convenient clicky-clicky format. My thanks to Scott Macmillan for organizing the talk, and all the BI attendees for sitting through a slideshow that wasn't a game demonstration.
I was pleased to get plenty of on-the-spot feedback, which all boiled down to: dude, where's your developer API? My next steps with Planbeast development are now more clear-cut than ever, which isn't a bad thing at all. Let's you and I see what happens.
Obvious Facebook / Twitter links are now available on all public event pages. Enjoy!
You'll find a new checkbox in the Comments section of every game or event's webpage (such as this one), labeled Email me when someone posts a new comment about this event / game. If you check it, then whenever anyone (besides you) posts a new comment about that whatever-it-is, you'll get a copy of the full text mailed to you. Simple as that! Give it a try, and let me know what you think.
I also fixed a bug that was biting people answering invitations to some private events, only to be greeted by an ugly error message. There was some yucky cookie-based confusion in the works, but it's all cleaned out now. Thanks to CyberKnight for alerting me to it.
Noticed yesterday that the day of the week ("Monday", "Tuesday", etc.) displayed on the event-scheduling page was insane, even though the correct day-of-week appeared on resulting events. Fixed. (Also got rid of some embarrassing debug-text that had managed to sneak onto that same page. Bah.)
The site's active population has dwindled a lot since its big spike in February, which isn't terribly surprising; March was a busy and travelful month for me, and it's been weeks since I've been able to do much in the way of promotion or feature-addition. I plan on putting together a talk about Planbeast for the Boston Indies meetup next month, which has the nice side-effect of forcing my attention back onto this project for a while. We'll see what happens!
I wrote up a Planbeast newsletter, with the idea that it'll be a monthly thing. A copy got put into the ol' email for everyone whose "Mailing List" checkbox on their accounts pref page was checked (at least as of a couple of days ago).
You can also read this first issue on planbeast.com, in beautiful full-color HTML. Enjoy!
I'm pleased to announce a new, important feature: you can now mark any event as repeating. Several users have requested this feature, and if it works it should keep Planbeast's calendar nice and active into the future, so I'm pretty excited about it.
Repeating events carry their users and their attached comments over from one iteration to the next. So, for example, all the discussion that happens in a weekly event's comments section remains in place, allowing for ongoing conversation among its players. Furthermore, when you join a repeating event as a guest, you'll continue to stay there for further repetitions until you leave.
To set an existing event as repeating, go to the page of an event that you're hosting, click edit this event's settings, and then select the desired frequency from this This event repeats pull-down menu. Naturally, this menu also appears as you set up a brand new event. Please give it a try, and let me know what you think!
I've started to add some Xbox Indie Game titles to the Planbeast catalog:
One of my main motivations in building Planbeast was my desire help promote all the multiplayer games that just don't have the critical mass of players to support a culture of online play. Getting to this point by themselves is especially hard for Indie Games, whose developers shoulder the entire burden of promotion.
Do you have any other Indie favorites that we should add?
