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TK Studios Blog
Just trying out a Metaplace embed
June 30th, 2009Marketing’s Bad Name
June 9th, 2009I’d like to share an experience I had a few years ago: I was at the supermarket, making smalltalk with the cashier, and she asked what I do for a living. I answered truthfully: “I work in marketing.”
I’ve never seen someone go from friendly and cheerful to all business so quickly. From the reaction, you’d think I’d said “I vivisect puppies.” I haven’t told someone “I work in marketing” since – at least not out of context.
The thing is, they’re partly justified. Think of marketing as a consumer and the first things that come to mind are probably an inbox full of spam, copious handfuls of junk mail (physical spam), phone calls while you’re eating dinner, commercials interrupting your night on the couch, and so on. Hell, why stop there? Don’t forget the bots posting nonsensical links in your blogs, or the bots and slimy “marketers” on Twitter (those guys with 50-100X more “following” than “followers”).
Yeah. Nowadays you’d better clarify: “I work in marketing, but I’m not one of the guys you hate.” Luckily these days I can say “I run my own business through websites,” and folks don’t always realize that that job description includes marketing. Being an entrepreneur is much more smalltalk-friendly than working in marketing.
Rule number 1 of modern marketing: Don’t be a dick.
Don’t send people any marketing materials they didn’t ask for: No spam, no junk mail. Blog comment spam, twitter spammers, etc, are Internet extensions of the old-and-broken mechanic of “I will interrupt people, steal their attention and valuable time, and they will buy my product.” People don’t react like that anymore. They hate you for it. I know I do. Don’t do it.
My projects will never spam you. I refuse to be that guy.
Listy.us will feature Google ads for non-paid accounts. Context sensitivity is it’s main selling point; If I have no choice but to show ads to support a project, I’m going to make sure those ads are something you want to see. As soon as a site can stand on its own without ads, the ads will be gone.
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Virtual Currency and Freemium Services
April 19th, 2009Here’s a monetization idea I’ve been playing with since participating in post-GDC “Idea Exchange: Emerging Trends in Game Development,” a sort of virtual conference that was held in both Metaplace and Second Life via a chat bridge between the two (pretty cool in itself). You can see a side-by-side screen comparison here.
During that chat, a lot of ideas were covered, and Raph briefly touched on how he thought offer-based marketing was a big new trend at GDC. Here’s the chat log, edited for relevance:
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New Theme and a Project Name
April 7th, 2009The new blog theme has been live for a couple days now. It still has a few tweaks to be done (single post page lacks styles for the next/previous links, for example), possibly some component rearranging, but it’s okay for now. The look and feel now matches the background on my twitter page, or you could say the background on the twitter page now matches the blog, as it was the blog that was designed first.
This is probably my first real attempt at a grid-based layout. Vertically it falls short of perfect baseline alignment, simply because I didn’t feel it was worth the effort to get it perfect. This is a blog. If it were a corporate product page, then yes, it would be worth the trouble to get everything in a perfect rhythm, but it’s not.
Also, I have not tested this in IE 6 or 7. Out of curiosity, I tested it in 8 a few seconds ago and it looks fine. Obviously, ignoring IE isn’t a luxury I can afford in the future, but in the current “I just want to get this WP theme done so I’m using something more appropriate than a public theme” context, it works.
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Predicting the Metaplace Explosion
March 26th, 2009Some people are overly enthusiastic about Metaplace’s potential: MPMillionaire, for example, thinks it’s the next Google. It’s not the next Google, that comparison doesn’t really make sense. Google is about data, and MP is about experience and immersion.
What is it? It’s the content, it’s the browser, it’s the server. It’s another way of viewing the web. It’s what VRML tried to be, it’s what big metacontent apps like Second Life wish they were. It’s a supplement to how you experience an enormous wealth of information.
What Metaplace is, I think, is quite possibly the most accessible rich multiplayer experience available. My understanding is that shortly after open beta it’ll be embeddable in any site. This means you can have your own personal MMO. You can have virtual locations that people can walk through. You can do pretty much anything with a virtual world, then embed a window into that world on any website.
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3 Disciplines that Shape My Work
March 22nd, 2009I’m at an interesting place where I’m influenced by several different “disciplines” of design, and I think that’ll show in my work. There’s a lot of resonance between these; While the first two are pretty obvious, the third may not be. I’ll compact the first two into one for brevity:
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A Workspace Photo
March 21st, 2009I spent about 4 hours today on modeling the database for one project. Other time was spent reading up on the Zend framework in order to lighten my load a bit—I figure a couple days learning it will save me weeks of programming work. I also took half an hour to read up on all the manual settings on my camera, and celebrated my newfound knowledge with a photo of my (almost) newly cleaned workspace:
The desk surface in my office
I’ve missed having a camera with manual settings. My most recent before this one didn’t have a fully-manual mode, or manual focus, and was therefore only good for tourist photography—point and click but nothing artsy. New one has a very nice manual mode: It’s a Canon Powershot A590. It’s no DSLR, but for the money (less than $100), it’s pretty damned nice. I still need to do a little Photoshop tweaking to perfect the image, though.
I guess I should set up a Flickr account, huh?
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How to Wrap Your Head Around a Project
March 20th, 2009I was making fairly slow progress on my primary project. I headed up to stay with my folks for a couple days and try out a new dentist in the area (I detest driving more than 15 minutes if I’m not going to be staying there for at least 24 hours). When I was packing for a couple days, I made a conscious decision to leave my laptop at home. All I brought was a sketchbook that I keep some of my notes in (ruled notebooks are the pits and remind me of school).
Between just being unplugged for a few days and a few discussions with my Dad who knows a crapload more about databases and project management than I, I think I’ve mostly got my head wrapped around this project. I got about 3 pages of notes down, and I write densely. I think when I head home tomorrow, I’ll be ready to start working on the app. There’s still a little bit of brainstorming left to do, but for the most part, I’m there.
So, if you ever find yourself stuck on a project, try unplugging for a few days. Don’t stop working, but go to paper and pencil if you can. If you aren’t working in computers, do something else to change your perspective; A shift in practice/view tends to lead to new approaches or solutions you hadn’t thought of before. Probably just because you aren’t following a pattern anymore and your brain has to start improvising more readily.
At least, it worked for me. Thought I’d share.
Got another project underway as well. I’m not really going to be talking about these projects directly until they’re at least alpha ready.
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A Few Software Recommendations
March 13th, 2009So, I’m now self employed. That means I need software, and I need it to be either free or inexpensive. Since my business is web applications, I put a little research into a cheap software kit for getting started on this kind of thing. Dreamweaver’s nice, but it’s pricey, and has less-than-awesome support for full-on software development. I’ll spare you the comparisons (for the most part) and just get right down to the results. These are all for Windows…
[edit: Added note to NetBeans bit to reflect irritation at them for republishing without permission.]
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What’s in a Verb? “Meep” vs “Nudge”
February 27th, 2009Metaplace, a project lead by Raph Koster of Ultima Online & Star Wars Galaxies fame, is an open-ended platform that allows anyone to create their own virtual world. You want a room for people to play chess? Cool, code up a chess game, board, design and decorate the room, and you’re on. Want a role-playing experience that teaches people about history? You can do it.
Something unique to Metaplace is the idea of the Meep. It’s a small dustbunny like critter that rolls or jumps around. It’s kind of the unofficial MP mascot, and the testing community loves them. So much so, that they created a world purely to protest the potential change of the verb “Meep” to “Nudge.”
Meep, as a verb, was (as I understand it) an idea of Cuppycake, community manager of Metaplace, that got put into the game on their free time. It was intended to be like a Facebook “poke.” There’s a context menu option when you click other players to Meep them.
The problem that prompted the suggested change from Meep to Nudge, and the backlash that ensued, was that new users just didn’t get it. I even suggested myself that people don’t really know what Meep is, and might not feel comfortable doing something they don’t really understand. I suppose I never fully explained my concern there: My problem was that users didn’t understand the idea right away, it wasn’t with the idea of Meeping people.
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