Toho's Dev Diary, 29 May
 

Here we go again!

I was at a convention yesterday, so kind of forgot to say anything. Woops! Oh well.

Been pretty busy with non-Trisphee things this week, and that cut into my time for things, but here goes:

The front page is pretty much ready to go, only thing holding it back at the moment is a few presentation images, and an enhancement I'm working on for the shops. Namely, the shops are going to say 'log in to buy' when you're not logged in, and links to specific items in the shop will be possible. Should be done by my next report.


Also this week, I replaced the super basic "Welcome to Trisphee!" email new users get upon registering with a more detailed one that looks pretty and actually gives direction of where to go and what to do. That was super long overdue, but it's so very easy to forget about things like that.


Feel free to comment on what I'm working on, or what you think I should be working on!

Ohhhh What convention where you at? (Totally cool about the Trisphee things though)

Can we please try to be active on the FB page? Twitter? Something? Like putting WIP images on the items (after they are released), or linking when Galla is doing pixeling work?

I was at Megacon in Orlando. :) Was dressed as a Summoner from FFXIV.

I personally run the Twitter account (poorly), and some other staffies post on Facebook sometimes.

That said, yes, we certainly should put more effort into those. It can be hard sometimes. I'll do my best to post on Twitter about things. What, though, I'm not sure. New item releases is a given... WIP images could work, I suppose.

Something besides just the announcements; progress pictures and art will get more interest and maybe more people.

This is true. Announcement only twitter accounts are super boring.

Maybe we should tweet about the art streams?

A good idea.

I could fb join.me links too. I always get nervous when I want to post things on there XD

SOmetimes I want to be like "hey guys! how's it going?" but then I think that's stupid and I don't do it.

Fair enough, not something we should do without prior planning and consideration of all relevant factors.

Or just tweet with screens of items that are being made, item concept art, snapshots of new games, pictures of that new front page, and so on.

Hype up that shit and tease like crazy.

Or after the items release show off the concept art and talk about what changed and why.

Make posts with arts and crafts about all things.

Just don't post things asking people to post, just post cool things to show off.

And share videos relating to the site in someway. (Share a video on some game everyone on Trisphee is hyped about that was shown off at this upcoming E3.)

Social media for sites and companies is pretty easy when given the freedom and open end to do fun things. Just look at the Sonic the Hedgehog Twitter or Arby's Facebook page for amazing ideals.

I admit, the Sonic the Hedgehog Twitter is probably the best official company twitter feed I have ever seen.

Add in Denny's Tumblr… that page makes me hungry.

http://beta.trisphee.com/

I've been checking out the new front page, ready to give some small critiques before it goes live.


1. Avatar Boxes and text from the News Feed is too close to each other.

2. Text box for news runs off once it passes the avatar's box. The text needs to be even and on top of each other in a brick when it moves beyond that box.

3. Banners are super cool and a good way to motivate people to start using the home page more would be to put clickable rewards on the front page. Reward 500 aurum for seeing a specially made banner that appears rarely on occasion.

4. Recent posts last time posted needs to be moved. It's not good seeing on the front page that a recent post was 2 hours ago.

I think I mention this before, but changing the time to words like Recently, moments ago, or a while ago to determine time between posts to create the illusion the site is more active is the way to go. But otherwise it's a nice inclusion.

5. Featured item is pretty much random avatar no? How about instead of everytime you go on the front page there is a new item advertised, it's every few minutes and you get a 10% aurum discount for clicking on the link and choosing to purchase the item? And if you remain idle on the page the items swap out in real time as well.

6. Changed Latest News to "The Trisphee Times" for consistency with forums. If your not interested change the name of the Trisphee Times form to Latest News.

7. Add a "see previous announcements" button at the end of the announcements page that redirects to the Trisphee Times.

8. The front page needs more color. The front page runs over the background and front page logo. The only thing that breaks up the top of the page with the rest is the big purple moon. Or the orange text in the news feed. Experiment with some additional color. But in hindsight it might be time to move on from the green/white gradient. Or maybe add character art onto the main page? Ton of room to play around with things here. Change the green to a spacey like banner or something.

COLOR. JUST. COLOR.


9. Needs cupholders yo.

Well, cat's out of the bag, I suppose. :P Let's see here...

1. The spacing on both sides of the boxes is all even, but since there's nothing else around, I can see how it seems closer in the middle. I'll tweak it a bit to see how it can be improved.
   
   
2. You're right, I should force a column on the avatar side.
   
   
3. Not a bad idea. I'll investigate.
   
   
   
4. "A while ago" is easy enough to do. It won't actually pull posts later than an hour ago, but it's still a good suggestion.
   
   
   
5. As it happens, I plan on having most of the stuff on the page live update, but not on the first pass. That'll include replacing the featured items avatars every so often. Giving a discount to the featured item is an interesting idea.
   
   
   
6. I'm not sure it's strictly necessary to change the names, but I'll consider it.
   
   
   
7. Good idea. The "Recent News" header goes to Trisphee times, but an explicit link would be a good plan as well.
   
   
   
8. I'm bad at graphics design. But I'll try. :)
   
   
   
9. Always needs cupholders.

I don't agree with the discount. Wouldn't people abuse it?

Then again, what do I know, I know nothing.

Please ignore my post >3>

like knowing the exact time. it keeps me in the right headspace whereas a vaugue time just frustrates me since it removes my knowing when a thing is happening and which things are happening sooner


i like the plain bg though i have a suggestion for a way to make t look a little less biased to the right

also, the discounts would be interesting if we had more stuff in the shop and if the new item was 30-min to an hour then i would be behind it, constant swapouts do lend to abuse and overstimulate. it would not do if it was cool for two or three days then people get burned out on it

here;
http://sta.sh/0271736qs2bu

all that changed s moving the background image and tris icon over to the left but weight-wise it makes it more even and without actually adding anything it puts more /on/ the front page


the problem with having humanoid art on the front is that it gets dated fast and reduces the perceived possibilities of the site by implying that what you see there is all there is to see x___x;;;

i will say though, gaia is on the money with having it's little daily chance crane game on the top of the site across from the avatar. you could make a little link to the crane game in some of the unused space ^^ i would even be willing to help wth the art if you are ok with pixels

Actually, been meaning to move the planet over some in the header, I just need to figure out what I did with the psd.

The Trisphee logo's placement...hmm. I had done something similar in some experiments with new headers a while back.


As for a daily chance link for Crane Game...I'm completely okay with putting something there, as long as it doesn't look out of place. :)

ok~ and if you want it to not be too oddly done eryna did it's daily chance with small balls, tris can do something like that too, like have it be something tiny and innofessive

also, and now i am getting back to old-old ideas, why would it not be a good idea to make single runes a rare drop? if they take long enough to ammass then they wont necessarily offset the rate of buying runes aaaand it is shown that if you make super-rare random grants then some people are more likely to just bite the bullet and buy outright to get enough while others put in more effort to meet daily visits to NOT have to pay. either way it would encourage people to come more often and feel more invested in the crane game

Yeah, I want to introduce runes as a rare reward for certain things, but...not the Crane Game. Other things planned will do it.

Too many colors and too many items in rotation via shops for it to be abused by any traditional sense (adding something to the url in order to have a discount coding wise would easily be abused or something anyone can easily figure out.) However, IT COULD BE ABUSED if there is a exploit in the system or something a user can do to edit the code or force a discount on a item.

-shrugs- It's a nice way to show off items, but in the long run there's no real point to the featured item unless there was a use for it. To me it seems more like a placeholder for a market system then anything.
That's actually a very good idea moving the logo ever so slightly to the side. There is a ton of white space on the sides of the screen and moving it would add a small dimension/nice shift on the screen.

And I agree with the human art bit, I was just randomly suggesting things to improve color on the page.

It is essentially a placeholder for something more involved for market stuff in the future. But for the moment, Trisphee has so many items, it's entirely possible to see something you've never noticed before show up there.

eeeeh, let's amend that; trsphee has so many -non common- items that are not available in the shops. tris has a pretty small shop selection truth-be-told

I suppose that's true.

tris does have an amazing event collection though XD

Yes, and I want to start cycling into shops event items that nobody who still visits has. That should be fun. :)

eeeeeh, i have been doing an informal tally and mostly it's just old stuff that can't be recolored or have tris get the rights to XD

There's a few hundred items that nobody has.

does not change my statement XD unless you have prebeta stuff that is properly layered or stuff that is unreleased i am not seeing it

I really need to write that item preview page so I can show arbitrary items...

good luck wth that XD

also, if you are serious about a little link image for the crane game drop me a note ^^ i am here on-and-off today

Things that could be added:

1. Like the current home page and being able to click 1, 2, and 3 to manually move the banners. On top of the new banner have another tab like box with a title for each banner, the titles move to the next box/title shown automatically like usual or when clicked on.

And maybe add some sort of visual timer so you know when it changes.

So essentially...

2. Change the black outlines of the boxes and go for a much lighter color (like lower opacity to like 20% if possible). You already have the green/white creating boxes to help separate everything the extra dark lines are a little overkill. This cleans up the appearance of the screen. YOU DO NEEDS LINES THERE just not as punctual. Those black lines stand out too much everything from the banners, and text boxes. They need to be toned down. (This is a good chance of using other colors to help add color the main page as well.) Try matching the trisphee green at first then go from there.

3. I think I found the problem with the news feed and the avatar boxes. Take note of your name, now imagine if it was half as long. Your name would spill into the text box next to it.

The picture making the box of your avatar is a good indicator that there isn't enough space between the avatar box and the text to begin with. So you need to make the text box next to it pushed slightly to the right to make room.

The banner rotator isn't quite done yet. It doesn't rotate right, and is missing the 'location pips' I plan on putting there.

As for the rest...I shall make use of the suggestions as I refine the front page. I want to make it be the "real" front page this week. Got only a few more things before I can justify to myself doing that.

http://i265.photobucket.com/albums/i...ps9c3kjamf.jpg

My quick mockup.


(The colors I used for the top portion was just an example showing you can do anything to add more color.)

Also note that the outer black box was tone down and became more transparent. Yeah do that to all the boxes. xD

edit: I just realized the banners don't redirect you to the respective shops.

So yeah. That would be nice. xD

And if an event going on a redirect to the event forum or something would work.

edit edit:

Gosh darn my damm obsession with this one thing right now. And gosh darn it's almost midnight and baskin robbins is closed. I WANT MY HALF OFF ICE CREAM! D:

The banner links are entirely wrong right now. I'm reworking how I update that part of the page, so it's just random trash, heh.

Although, for programmer art, I don't think I did a terrible job with the banner images themselves.


Thanks for that mockup. Good spacing suggestions. :)


Also. You clearly have adblock. Heh.

>.> On the beta site yes. On regular trisphee no, it's disabled.

I see. Well, thank you for disabling it on Trisphee. It is appreciated. :)

I don't begrudge people using it. So many sites are horrific about ads.

Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that when I moved servers a couple weeks ago, I enabled ssl for Trisphee and beta Trisphee, so if you prefer browsing secure, you can preface it with https:// instead of http. I may force all users to use https at some point, but not right now.

At least, I think I forgot to mention. I know I said it to coda and some others.

there are ads running? when did that happen? XD

Uh... It's been months if not a year now. They're unobtrusive, at the bottom of the page instead of injected somewhere distracting.