Video Game Collections: Senior Year Project

[krilik]

EDIT:

Update 12/19/11: Here is the link to my project : http://rollingthestone.net/CIS360/

This is a temporary domain that I was using for my project's presentation.

Security is basically non-existent since it was beyond the scope of the class. So anyone can add and edit any information about video games, publishers, developers, genres, and video game systems... Kind of like a wiki except without moderation, for now. In the future I want to make it a peer moderated site where users will be able to vote on information accuracy.

There are a lot of features that I wasn't able to implement due to time constraints, but hopefully I will add them in the future.

Criticism and critique is welcome. I want to make this an application that would be most useful to people who collect video games, so any input on what could make it a better way to track your collections would be great.

---------------------------

Original Post

Not really sure where I should put this, but whatever.

So I finally got off my lazy ass and went back to school, now that I've made it to the end of my first semester of senior year I've had to work on some class projects. One of which I'm particularly proud of and interested in maintaining that I wanted to show off. This was for a Database Management class where all they basically make you do is design a database with SQL Server or Access and have you run queries against it.

So I was like fuck that shit, and decided I was going to build an idea that I've had for a website. The idea was to create an application that would allow users to keep track of their video game collections in an manageable environment. There are a lot of gaming related websites out there that kind of do what I would like, but none of them are as robust at keeping track of video game collections as much as avid game collectors would want in my opinion. Or their interface is just not designed well enough for massive use. So I built this:






I built the website with ASP.NET with no prior knowledge of ASP.NET and with minor experience with C#. It took me about a weekend of teaching myself ASP.NET to get it in its current functioning state.

Once the semester ends and I receive my final grade in the class I'm going to put up a public link to the site so people can mess around with it.

[JarrodParkes]

From what I can see this looks like an awesome project. My brother and I have been avid collectors of N64 games and memorabilia for years, and maybe we can use this to keep up with it better than our massive excel file...

Nice work, God Bless.

[dandymcgee]

That site looks awesome man. I'll definitely check it out when you post the link.

[LeonBlade]

Pretty simple stuff, yet very useful and expansive. That's usually how things like this end up being.
Simple concept, but really cool shit.
I'd love to play around with it when you release it... I only have one thing to say...
ASP.NET...

[krilik]

From what I can see this looks like an awesome project. My brother and I have been avid collectors of N64 games and memorabilia for years, and maybe we can use this to keep up with it better than our massive excel file...

Nice work, God Bless.

That's my hope. I have the same problem. Lately my video game collection has been growing quite large so I started making excel sheets to keep track of everything. Then I started doing some searching for products like this and couldn't find anything that met my satisfaction.

That site looks awesome man. I'll definitely check it out when you post the link.

Thanks

Pretty simple stuff, yet very useful and expansive. That's usually how things like this end up being.
Simple concept, but really cool shit.
I'd love to play around with it when you release it... I only have one thing to say...
ASP.NET...

ASP.NET for a few reasons

1) I wanted to let my professor run it locally for grading purposes. Being a university they give knobjobs to Microsoft for free products. So our school already has Visual Studio installed on every machine there.

2) It was a group project and I needed a way to share the database among members. The easiest solution was using an Access database. I know there are ways to connect PHP to an Access database, but then I have to rely on finding web hosting that could do it. And then I would fail to meet reason number 1.

3) I have access to an ASP.NET web host for free through my dad who uses it for development purposes for his job. So it was easy for me to setup a test environment.

With all that said I actually kind of like ASP.NET. Seeing how well I was able to get a functioning application up, while I taught myself, in 1 week is pretty impressive to me. Its a bloated pile of mess, but in return I had very quick turnaround in terms of development time.

If it all I become very serious about maintaining it I would probably want to rewrite it in PHP. I just don't know PHP well enough to create a product of this size from scratch. Things like security I have no clue about since I've never done it and always opted to use off the shelf products that have that kind of stuff done for me.

[LeonBlade]

I understand, I'm not gonna tell you how to do your thing.
Can't wait to see it when you release it to the public.

[MadPumpkin]

This is sick man!! I can definitely see myself using it. I have some minor aesthetic disagreements but it even looks great for being more programmer, and less designer web design. Definitely hit up this thread again when it's officially released.

[krilik]

Here is the link to my project : http://rollingthestone.net/CIS360/

This is a temporary domain that I was using for my project's presentation.

Security is basically non-existent since it was beyond the scope of the class. So anyone can add and edit any information about video games, publishers, developers, genres, and video game systems... Kind of like a wiki except without moderation, for now. In the future I want to make it a peer moderated site where users will be able to vote on information accuracy.

There are a lot of features that I wasn't able to implement due to time constraints, but hopefully I will add them in the future.

Criticism and critique is welcome. I want to make this an application that would be most useful to people who collect video games, so any input on what could make it a better way to track your collections would be great.