Ace Combat: Assault Horizon

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http://acecombat.com
March 1, 2011

This is the marketing version of the website for the video game, Ace Combat: Assaul Horizon (release date Nov 9th 2011). The website, as it was in this stage, is a very simple CMS driven brochure site. I was the primary back end developer helped out by a very good build engineer, Ken Donnellan The design was done by Eric Jordan, all of us working for 2Advanced studios at the time of this writing. The back end runs on Kohana (most excellent PHP MVC framework), front end DHTML driven by jquery mostly. We integrated in the PHPBB forum, facebook, twitter and youtube here there and everywhere.

The coding of this site was a breeze. I had good, established patterns to follow for the CMS by plagiarizing Jonathan Reyes's work from the Namco corporate site. The real tricky parts with this site were 1) ridiculous deadline and 2) central authentication integration. Deadlines are deadlines, we all have them, they suck, oh well, whadyagonnado. The authentication integration was a challenge though. 

The idea behind the central auth system (CAS) is to have one auth provider for a host of related websites, so that the same login credentials will work on all the different sites. It's a good idea, not incredibly hard to design something pretty stable and secure. However, it was hard for this project because we have 4 authentication systems to revamp and make work nicely together: Kohana auth system for the CMS, PHPBB, Facebook and the CAS. Suffice to say, this was a challenge. Great learning experience though. After this project I'm a lot closer to being a master of authentication systems. Wish I could scrap the whole thing and start over, but who's gonna pay for that??

Pros:

 

  • Awsesome design and coworkers
  • I'm pretty good with CMS's so the project was very quick to do without many problems
  • High profile site, which is a bonus

Cons:

  • Crazy deadline and poor project management
  • Challenging authentication integrations (this seems like more of a pro actually)
  • We used PHPBB which is one of the most poorly written PHP apps I've worked with

 

 

Screenshots