Quindecennial

Scott Hardie | February 10, 2013
It felt good to revisit past editions of the goo game this week! I wondered if I should write something each day, but being offline would have prevented me from keeping up with it. Instead, here's a review now that the theme is concluded.


Monday: 1999 This was the very first design of the game, when the entire game was just a single page. We had so few players back then that a very simple rule system was possible (be the first to solve ten goos, two from each of five categories). Players would have to email me their guesses because the page wasn't interactive.

Tuesday: 2002 This was a very data-driven version of the game, which was hard to pull off because the site still wasn't interactive yet: I had to manually update scores every time someone sent me their guess. A growing player body required a new rule system, this time using points to keep track of progress, with both cumulative and consecutive guesses leading to higher and higher point totals. I moved the whole site to CelebrityGooGame.com.

Wednesday: 2003 At last, a fully interactive site, thanks to Matthew Preston coding it for me. Inspired by the design of an album cover, I designed a randomized header that changed with each visit, and stayed fixed at the top of the page using frames. I wanted a clean page, and I think it turned out well.

Thursday: 2004 Learning from Matthew's work, I built my own interactive site, save for the fancy navigation menu that once seemed impossibly complicated but today I could write in my sleep. For the first time, each section of my growing site had a shared design but with its own color-coding. Random faces at the very top highlighted player accomplishments (rounds won). The major scoring system of this period was towers, where players would try to string sets of five goos together before opponents knocked them down.

Friday: 2005 My coding skills landed me a programming job, and I learned so much about PHP practically overnight that it inspired me to built a bigger, better, bolder version of the site. This one emphasized large photos at the top that randomly shifted every few seconds, and a return to the clean white look of years past. A new goo now appeared daily instead of weekly. Players could place their goos on a 10x10 grid strategically, trying to fill in the entire space before their opponents.

Saturday: 2007 The game has relocated to the domain goo.tc at this point. My skills had come a long way and I wanted to build a more suitable home, something that would sustain us for a long time, and we're actually still using the same code and database today, just reskinned and upgraded. I was not much of a designer, so I found a look that I liked at a cable channel's website and modified it for our use, going back to color-coding and making the goo game red this time. I'm still quite fond of this design, one of my favorites over the years, even if the exact hues were a little hard on the eyes. The game went through a series of scoring systems during this era, as I searched in vain for a "perfect" system. We still haven't found one today; I just gave up looking.

Sunday: 2010 This was a cosmetic change, as the site needed a wider layout and more white, but the underlying code and game were still the same. Obviously, Tragic Comedy and the gray root section of the site are still running in this design today, and I hope to do something about that soon. I liked a lot of aspects of this design, from the dynamic navigation menu (it was very easy to add and remove pages) and the space at the top for occasional announcements. We moved to Funeratic.com, reskinned the goo game, and started playing in a series of bracketed tournaments that is still going to this day. In fact, the next tournament begins tomorrow. I hope you're ready!

Chris Lemler | February 10, 2013
Looking forward to the tourney!!!!!! Should be a very exciting one :).....I really enjoyed the theme :)