I have been revamping our website a bit today.  I think it looks better than it did, but what do you think?  What do you like or dislike about our site?  Are we missing anything?

The main things I changed are that the outer background is now black instead of blue, the rss buttons are on the left, I removed some of the outline lines, all of the stuff on the right has been cleaned up and decluttered a bit, and the Soldak logo is now centered.  Here's a screenshot of the old design.

I do want to keep the site fairly simple, have a clean look, load pretty quick, and also be easy to use though so keep that in mind.

Comments

Starting late last week, I have been working on getting Kivi's Underworld on portals.  This is always kind of weird. Most of the portals are pretty restrictive of what goes on their site, which makes a lot of sense.  This means our games get rejected sometimes.  Sometimes it's for very good reasons, like Depths of Peril got rejected from a bunch of the casual only sites.  Yeah, that just wasn't very surprising.  However, sometimes it's for just weird reasons, like DoP also got rejected because the site has a hardcore audience.  Huh?  Depths of Peril isn't a hardcore game?  It sure doesn't have state of the art graphics, but you would think a hardcore audience would love it.

Kivi is going to face some of the same things.  It would be a shame if the casual sites reject it for not being casual enough though. It's extremely easy to get into which is a big part of being a casual game.  Also casual portals really need to spread out a bit, in my opinion.  Right now it is almost all match 3, hidden object, and time management games.  Eventually these categories are going to go out of style and if that is the only games a portal has they are going to have issues.

Anyways, it looks like we are already going to get picked up by at least a few portals.  So I have been making builds for people.  After doing this for a few portals for DoP, I made this process a lot easier.  I made it easier to configure the game for different portals.  Usually for a new portal very little of the game changes except some configuration data.  Every once in a while a portal wants something different and I have to do a bit of work, but eventually it gets moved into the configuration data so that this particular change will be easy in the future.

Another strange thing about portals is logos and text.  Each portal wants a logo or two and wants at least a couple text descriptions of your game.  Many times this is a short description and a long description.  The thing is every portal wants the logos in a different resolution and the text in different lengths.  Now sometimes photoshop can just resize icons to the new size. However, going from something like 200x200 to 60x60 doesn't resize very well, so a new icon is needed.  The text thing just drives me nuts.  So far I have 10 descriptions of Kivi anywhere from a 45 character description up to our full blurb which is a bit over 1400 characters.  Rewriting text this many times tends to make my brain go numb.

Since I mostly talked about some negative aspects of portals.  I'll end with a few positives.  Despite my ramblings, working with portals has been good.  Most of the portals we have worked with have been very nice. This big thing about portals of course is that they help us get much larger distribution than we do by ourselves.  More people buying and playing our games is good. :)

Comments

Like most people with email accounts I get way too much spam.  It's not nearly as bad as when I worked at Ritual though.  At Ritual, their website had all of our email address directly on the web page for a while, which as most people know now, is very bad.  At one point in time I was getting well over 100 spam emails a day.

Anyways, I got an offer today about improving the SEO of our website.  I get these occasionally and I don't think much about it and I file it away so it might be useful at a future date.  Even though I usually reply to most of my emails (sometimes slowly), I have never replied to one of these.  I know why now. 

When I got the one today, it seemed really familiar.  So I looked in the folder where I put SEO offers and yep I got another SEO offer yesterday.  So I clicked on the one from yesterday and just about nothing changed, just the person's name and company name.  Then I checked the other 5 emails that I have saved.  Surprise, surprise they are almost all the same and look something like this:

My name or email address

4 lines of generic SEO offer + some gmail address

Sincerely,
Some Name
Blah Marketing

Each one is a different person and only 2 of them have the same company name.  What is the chance any of these were actually sent by a person?  I would guess zero.

Anyways, I'm just amused that I have gotten a bunch of spam that is pretty relevant to me and doesn't contain obvious spam links, but it still is off putting enough that I have never replied to any of them.  Even more amusing is that they have sent so many of them to me that now I know they are spam.

Comments

Delilah has started something that I think is pretty cool over on her blog (and the forums).  She is writing a reality show like you would see on TV like Survivor, Big Brother, Apprentice, etc. but instead of boring people it's going to have mythical creatures.  It's all fictional of course and not in video format or anything, but I think it's going to be interesting. Since it's fictional, her contestants can do things that are actually dangerous and potentially deadly. :)

As of today, she has revealed the first contestant, Forest the Stalker.  Yes, stalkers are a monster type in Depths of Peril.  There will likely be some monsters from Depths of Peril, Kivi's Underworld, and from some other properties that we are developing.

Of course, one of the cool things is that everyone will be able to  participate. You will be able to vote on many things (the first being which contestants get to be on the show), you of course will be able to comment on anything, and there is even the potential that we use your ideas on what challenges to put our characters through.

Comments