Fantasy University

You start off as a new student at Fantasy University, in the fictional land of Elanthia. Everywhere you turn, in the game world, you will find a multitude of bizarre characters, items and quests, generally parodies of pop-culture references, and popular memes.

FU (yes, FU) was built upon the Snark Engine. Okay, not really, but it probably should have been called that given how cheeky the game was at every turn. It was actually developed in Ruby using Ruby on Rails on the Heroku platform.

Why Ruby? Well, first, none of us had any experience with it. So this was a challenge to see what we could make. My theory is that you have to try new things and keep learning. Always. And this was a good example of that.

Originally intended as a Facebook game, this product suffered from some bad timing as it released just as the Facebook game fad was gasping its last breath. The title worked a bit better on other platforms, but people were quickly migrating to different sorts of entertainment. Like most things in life, timing is everything.

Still, for its insane level of humor, this remains one of my favs.