Hi Nate,
Wanted to give you a heads up that I'm seeing a blank screen your "Our story" page. Chrome. No console errors. There is markup in source. https://www.lever.co/our-story
Total Annihilation was great. The big difference for me that made Starcraft superior was the uniquely balanced set of races to choose from. The two factions in TA were essentially mirror images of each other. Starcraft always felt like it had another layer of depth to strategy as a result of the various matchups between races.
Totally agree that the different balanced factions made Starcraft superior BUT, the beautifully designed interface made TA superior in another way. Coming from clunky predecessors like Red Alert, the removal of micromanagement in TA was a revelation.
You could queue multiple units to build, adding in multiples of 1 or 5 (Supreme Commander later made this into an even more powerful system). You could queue an infinite amount of orders for each of your units - not just pathing waypoints but everything. I used to set my Commander up to do about 15 minutes of building at the start of the game.
You could tell buildings to "move" somewhere and all units coming out of those buildings would go there when built. You could tell construction units to patrol and they'd automatically repair damaged units and collect resources on the way. You could tell construction units to assist buildings and they'd help build new units. You could press Ctrl-A to select all units, Ctrl-W to select all fighting units, and other ones for airplanes, ships etc. And so on.
I think it pretty much shaped the attitude I have today where in game design, I think everything that has one "correct" answer should be automated away, and everything else made as simple as possible.
Of course when TA first came out the battle wasn't yet between TA and Starcraft, but between TA and Dark Reign.
If I remember, each unit was rendered in 3D so it was visually stunning as well, as opposed to Starcraft that looked flat and old to me. The graphics during huge fights were really awesome, and you got a lot of time to admire it when you had huge battles and it slowed the frame rate down to a crawl.
Yep and not only are the units rendered in 3D but the unit's projectiles really move in 3D and get blocked by terrain etc, and line-of-sight gets blocked by hills and so on as well. The terrain is just an image but it's calculated via a 3D mesh that underlies it.
Also, TA supports all screen resolutions your monitor does, so far from needing a Remaster, TA still looks surprisingly good today at high resolution. The interface (which is designed to work with 640x480) quickly gets tiny though.
This made the green race (forget their name) in Supreme Commander quite overpowered - as artillery doesn't suffer from line-of-fire and that race had the most powerful artillery.
The simulation of projectiles also made the game run like a dog, but we loved that slow dog.
I recently switched my old VPS-hosted Wordpress blog to a static site generated by Middleman[1] hosted on Github pages[2]. It's been a really nice way to maintain flexibility of design with a huge boost to performance and improved development/writing workflow. I use markdown so I can even write my articles in a markdown editor if I want to.
The presence of an itinerary for the interviewee should be a requirement. Sadly it's not. I've taken two interviews in the past week where I was in the dark as to what my visit would look like.
Interesting! I started this project a long while ago and I gradually introduced additional features and formats over time after running into performance issues with other file parsers (not Tika). Tika looks like a great solution if you don't mind the Java dependency.
I'm also in a similar position where I'd like to store approximately 560k records / user / year. My understanding is that Cassandra doesn't support some useful queries that would be useful when business logic is less clear (like group by)[1]. I'm leaning towards using PostgreSQL with a dedicated write DB until performance becomes an issue.
About 2 years ago we paid $2k to have a solar study done on our house. This is just one data point but the results of that study and Google Sunroof are an order of magnitude apart. And this was from a solar company trying to sell us solar panels.
You might want to look at structuring your pricing in a similar manner to gym memberships given that the product has a similar usage pattern. There was an interesting Planet Money[1] podcast recently that noted that many gym memberships are structured to be yearly contracts ... because people like that idea of putting money down so that they feel committed. You might be able to tap into some of the same psychology.
Another approach I saw a gym take recently was having a relatively high price but then you "earned" back a portion of the fee every month by meeting a certain activity goal.
It seems like it might be complicated to administer, but I think the psychology works well for an aspirational product because people will like the idea of making a commitment to a personal improvement but will probably over-estimate their future activity.
https://github.com/checkr/flagr