Christian Peters

I was a part of several different Christmas gatherings this year. After spending time with family and friends and having given away or received many gifts, I came to the realization that the gift opening was not a very fun or exciting experience. I am unlikely to remember anything about the opening of presents. Looking back to when I was a kid, I feel like I remember a lot more excitement around Christmas. I would open up gifts to real surprise and delight, but now as an adult I have the means to buy everything I need and much of what I want, which makes it very difficult for a gift to be truly surprising in the way it would have been when I was younger. I remember  having a greater sense of anticipation as a kid. I looked forward to finding out what was under the tree. As I have grown older that anticipation has disappeared. Occasionally I still get nice surprises or have found a gift for someone else that I am more excited to give than anything I would receive. It seems to me that

I recently had the need to setup using JSHint between both Visual Studio 2013 and WebStorm 9. Below are the steps I took to accomplish this task. Must have Web Essentials installed to use in Visual Studio. Either choose to "Create Global JSHint settings" from the Web Essentials Menu, or add the following files to the root of your project. .jscsrc should look like this: {      "excludeFiles" :   [ "**" ] } Reason for this is to prevent this Linter from running, for some reason Web Essentials will use all of the Linters it can find, not just JSHint. By excluding all files here you tell WE to not use JSCS. .jshintignore will hold definition of files that should be ignored for JSHint: Scripts/vendor/** Scripts/angularjs/** Scripts/app/common/directives/vendorDirectives/** .jshintrc contains settings for what you want JSHint to verify: // Custom Globals      "globals"         :   {   "angular" :   true ,   &qu

Free to play games have become really popular recently and one would assume that a large reason for that popularity at least for the game makers is that they are likely more profitable than other business models. They all share the same basic concept for how to make money: give away the game for free and then charge customers for access to something within the game. The idea is that if you have a game that costs money up front you have a limited number of customers that will be willing to pay that up front price. If instead your game is free initially, then you open that game up to being played by everyone. With no price barrier to get started, even someone that may not normally have been interested in your game could give it a try. Now that the game is open to the maximum number of potential customers, you hope that a number of them will buy or pay for part of the game. This is where the difference comes, in how a game gets you to pay. I have experience with many games that follow t

Recently someone asked the Blizzard developers for more slots for decks in the game Hearthstone. The response was that they are talking about it and looking into it, but no decision has been made yet. One of the concerns over adding deck slots is that it could complicate the UI for Hearthstone and make it more difficult for new players to understand. I have what I think would be a good solution to add more deck slots without increasing the learning curve for the game much if at all. First I would take a look at the current selection screen for starting to play a game. It defaults to showing the decks that are custom built by the player if they have any custom decks, and there is an option to page over to the basic decks. This basic deck screen is perfect for how I would change this process. Instead of having 2 pages of decks, 1 for basic and 1 for custom, you would just see the select a Hero screen. Then once you selected the Hero you wanted, you would see all of the decks that

I used to play World of Warcraft, but for many reasons I have not played in several years. With the recently released expansion, Warlords of Draenor, I have been hearing a lot of positive things and find myself wishing I could play some of it again. Unfortunately, I do not have enough free time to justify paying for the subscription, but I do occasionally have free time once or twice a month where I could spend a decent amount of time playing WoW. This is my idea of how Blizzard could add a free to play option to World of Warcraft that would open the game up to more customers. First note, the existing subscription model would not go away. If people are enjoying the game as it is and can spend the time and money that a subscription makes sense, then nothing should change for those players. In fact, I think that the free to play option I am going to describe should encourage some players that have never taken a look at WoW to try it out and realize that they would be better off with th