Yes, I finished a project, amazing as that is. After a couple months of weekend coding sessions, I have launched a new web game, a fantasy racing league…for Hot Wheels. Best part is, you don’t have to collect to play, but right now I just need your help testing it all.

I finished project, now I need your help

I wrote before about the project being along the lines of more traditional fantasy sports. Instead of picking players for your fantasy baseball team, you pick Hot Wheels cars…the ones you think will go fast. Then I’ll be racing those cars in real life and logging all the results. And just like other fantasy sports, you’ll get points every time your players…er, cars…does a good job.

And I need your help testing the game. I just launched it into a beta phase and need as many people playing around with it as I can to look for bugs and other issues.

Join the Redline Derby Fantasy Racing League and help test

Even if you’re not a toy person or a car collector, please consider signing up for a player account and just seeing what it’s all about. Who knows, you might have some fun…after all, you just have to pick the cars you like. The rest is all up to me.

If you do sign-up and give it a run, please let me know what you think. You can comment here at Morning Toast or over at Redline Derby. On Twitter, Facebook…wherever…I need as much input as possible so I can make things better.

This time I knew when to stop

Does this car look fast to you?

The building process really put in perspective just how simple fantasy sports really are because it’s all numbers. From a player standpoint, you can take a couple routes. You can just pick the players you like, or you can go hardcore and crunch numbers to pick the players you think will actually do well. Eitherway, you make your picks and then you wait. Then you tweak your team until it’s near-perfect…which is the fun part.

From a builder standpoint, the whole system is really nothing but a shopping cart without the checkout. It’s all just database-in, database-out. There isn’t any real processing that has to be figured out. Since the data is all external, it’s done through data entry, which is quite simple to build for. Once you have the data, it’s just deciding how many ways you want to crunch it.

I spent more time concerning myself with how players interact with the game than anything, which is exactly what I enjoy doing. I think it turned out pretty well. Not perfect, never will be, but I’m happy that I was able to stop myself from scope creep…which is what usually leads to the unfinished projects.

While the idea of fantasy Hot Wheels sounds kind of silly, even more so than non-fantasy Hot Wheels racing, it’s a hobby I enjoy and I think others can enjoy too. You don’t have to invest hundreds of dollars (like me) to have fun with some simple toys. If I can build something that lets people quietly enjoy toys (even virtually), it’s well worth the effort.