The biggest challenge so far for The Restaurant Game has been the fact that two people need to be online at the same time. While about 90 people have logged onto The Restaurant Game, many of them have quit before finding another player online. Version 1.6 remedies this problem with the new Restaurant Vacancy Notification Widget! Players can choose to minimize the game to a small lightweight window that displays counts of the current number of Waitresses and Customers needed on the servers. No more hitting the Server Refresh button over and over. Just sit back, relax, wait for the widget to "ding" you, then jump on in!
This Wednesday night (Feb 28) at 9pm EST will be our final server test, before spreading the word about this project to a wider audience. We're going to fill all 20 servers at once to test the load. Grab theResturant v1.6 and join in.
Posted by jorkin at February 27, 2007 01:30 PMI played your game a couple of times and I like the concept. I'm curious about a few things. How many games have been played so far? Can you review individual playthroughs? If so, of those, approximately how many playthroughs have featured significant social interaction (as opposed to being 'all business')? Do you have any plans to describe strange, interesting and amusing playthoughs of the multiplayer version once the single-player version is complete?
Posted by: BiggerJ at February 28, 2007 10:47 PMGood questions Bigger J,
I am working on the tools that process the gameplay logs and filter out the "real" games -- the games that actually had two players. So, very soon I will start posting daily updates on the project web site tracking the number of games played so far.
Yes, I can review individual playthroughs. I have a tool that distills a log file into something easily human readable (looks like a script to a play), and soon I will have a tool that converts a log into Torque Script so that it can be replayed in engine.
I can't comment on counting "significant social interactions" until I've finished collecting data.
Once the single-player version is complete, I will definitely share interesting and amusing observations. I will also release the corpus (with identifiers removed) for use by other interested researchers.
Posted by: jorkin at March 1, 2007 05:19 AMOoh, I'd like an order of the 16oz Corpus, sounds tasty
Posted by: andrew stern at March 2, 2007 02:31 PM