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luninosity · 4 years

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fanfic writers tag game!

I was tagged by the marvelous @musette22 for this lovely fanfiction tag game that was devised by the clearly very brilliant @thewaythatwerust, to discuss some of the fics I’ve written over time! Thanks so much! 💖

Let’s see, I shall tag... @thebestpersonherelovesbucky @turtletotem @gerec @whtaft and @ninemoons42 <3

Which of your fics…

* Did you think would get a bigger reaction/audience than it got:

Ah, a tricky one! I feel like I never really have expectations - I just write words because I can’t not! But maybe lines of light, which was my Steve/Bucky Fake Character Death Trope fic - it’s sort of a weird little fic, but I wanted more of that trope, but maybe that’s just me!

* Got a better reaction than you expected:

Oh, goodness - just about all of them! I remember being so shy and so nervous to share any of my writing, years ago, and now I write things that people seem to like...I think probably never mind the why and wherefore surprised me most, though! That’s my TJ Hammond/Johnny Storm fic, and when I started writing it mine was literally the third fic on AO3 for that pairing, and for that small a fandom, I’ve just been amazed.

Also, of course: I’m constantly amazed by how much people love Like Sugar! It was the biggest thing I’d ever tried to write, and it made me a better writer along the way, and I suspect it’s the Evanstan fic/series people might remember most, from my fics? (Also also, if original-fic-inspired-by-an-Evanstan-drabble counts: the love for Character Bleed has been overwhelming!)

* Is your funniest:

...am I funny? I don’t know! *waves hands about* I feel like I never set out to “write something funny,” but then again I like terrible puns and wordplay, so there’re probably funny lines in most fics? I hope?

Honestly maybe every inch of north and south, which has the Chris-turned-into-a-puppy plot, or Now That I’ve Found You, Stay, because giant patriotic dildos, or some of the banter in just a couple lovebirds, because I love Chris and Seb in that one. Or some of Bucky’s pulp fiction stories in tales to astonish. Or all the TERRIBLE autumn-related puns in the current Evanstan fic, A Place Not Far Away!

Or we could go REAL old-school and pull out the McFassy semi-crack fic in which James gets magically cursed to turn into a kitten. There’s that.

* Is your darkest/angstiest:

Ahahahaha. Um. *stares in Characters Having Emotions*

Okay, okay, um... Aside from certain specific chapters of Like Sugar and Amateur Cartography, it’s either The Tones That Tremble Down Your Spine (Bucky needs all the softness, after this! of course so does Steve...) (sometimes I think about adding a chapter, because it ends a little abruptly, but I also wanted it to - not everything’s 100% resolved, but it’s clearly on a healing trajectory!) ...

...or, over in Cherik-land, I hope we rise to the occasion, which does have a hopeful ending but is painful, or the balancing act stories (also Cherik) which were...personal in many ways (also originally written over on Livejournal, because I’m old).

* Is your absolute favourite:

Impossible! *laughs* It’s always the current story I’m (actively) writing. Which at the moment is the Evanstan autumn fluff-with-porn A Place Not Far Away. I don’t know if it’s my favorite-favorite, but it’s nice to get back to Evanstan and I love fall.

* Is your least favourite:

Also impossible! There’re things I love about all my stories. If I have to...maybe It’s Time To Bring This Ship Into The Shore, mostly because Michael’s such a dick to James for a lot of it. Which is also true in Loving Days (why was that a plot point in a few of my McFassy fics?) but I think I did a better job with his redemption in that one, and showing how much he changed and tried harder. And with Ship & Shore I wasn’t super-knowledgeable about the soul-bond trope (it was a request-fic) so I never felt quite sure I’d done it well enough!

* Was the easiest to write:

Amusingly, considering how epic and glorious and long the whole series became, I’d say Like O, Like H - the first Like Sugar Evanstan story. It just flowed. It knew what it wanted to be, and I tried to keep up. (Lovebirds was also one of those, as was the TJ/Johnny fic, never mind the why and wherefore.)

* Was the hardest to write:

the sound of rain on tin. It’s been the fic I’ve had the hardest time with ever. It’s my own fault for trying to do too much in terms of plot - sort of AU, an Evanstan-Stucky crossover, Lovecraftian elements - and then starting to post before I had it all properly sorted. I do know how it ends in general terms, I promise! but resolving plot/action has never been one of my strengths, and we’ve hit the point where I actually have to figure out How To Fix The Magic Portal-Thing, and I don’t feel like I’ve got it worked out well enough.

I mean if you all just want me to write the emotional Sebastian talking to Steve Rogers (and maybe a little curious kissing) and Chris talking to Bucky, and then *poof* suddenly Seb and Bucky are back in their respective universes and we get Emotional Reconciliation Scenes and Love Confessions, that part’s easy. I’ve had stray bits of those scenes done for years.

* Have you re-read the most:

Like Sugar, in part for continuity as I worked on later stories and in part because I’m really kind of proud of it.

* Would you recommend to someone reading your work for the first time:

Depends on what genres they like! I’m probably best known for - if anything - Like Sugar, and I think it’s pretty representative of my writing in terms of loving tender kink-with-emotions! But the person would have to not mind Evanstan RPF and soft Dom/sub kink and arranged (sort of) marriage tropes.

Other than that, for Evanstan, maybe Sweet Disposition (the third version of the clothes-sharing fic!); or (baby won’t you please), which is the Chris And Seb Go To A Sex Club For Research For a Role fic, or tempt me, tease me, which is...Sebastian leaves an unsatisfactory date with someone else (brief and random) to go pick Chris up from a bar, and then there’re lots of revelations about Feelings, and also porn-with-emotions. Those last two ‘feel’ similar in my head for some reason - mood, maybe, or story arcs about revelation and discovery.

...for Stucky, maybe when and where our eyes meet (Bucky falling asleep! soft blankets!)...or tales to astonish, because it’s such fun!

...if you want to go a bit older, I have weird affection for my first-ever Cherik fic, Know That It’s True, which is a Cerebro hurt/comfort fic, and then I love the slow development of the McFassy in No Wonder, No Wonder, which I occasionally still think about trying to revise as original, but it’s so character-driven that it’d be hard, but I love the feel of it, the hints of magic and the setting...

* Are you most proud of:

Like Sugar! At the time it was the biggest story I’d ever tried to write, both in terms of length and in terms of world-building and planning and characters growing closer together. Character Bleed got more complicated in terms of needing multiple outlines and plot, eventually, but I couldn’t’ve done that if I hadn’t done Like Sugar first.

* Has your favourite line/exchange/paragraph (share it):

Too hard to pick! There are so many!

I sometimes say it’s this one, from tempt me, tease me, though not always:

“If you’d like,” Sebastian offers, “we can even tell them I borrowed your key and lost it, if you don’t mind asserting small untruths to hotel personnel.” Big blue half-plastered Captain America eyes stare at him some more. “…Chris?” “You…” One hand waves, a partial gesture, pulled back at the last second. As if Chris has meant to reach out, and thought better of that. “You really would? You wouldn’t, y’know, mind?” Sebastian half-smiles. Thinks of cars with broken-glass windows in Romanian capital-city streets, thinks of students waving flags and cheering with feral glee, thinks of saucer-eyed childhood memories and songs of revolutionary fervor and desperate upheavals of optimism like birthing-pains. Chris Evans is beautiful and genuine and real, and Sebastian would do far worse things, would splinter his body and perjure his soul, to give Chris one more day in which to eat pizza and laugh and clap friends on the shoulder with a broad happy hand. “No,” he says, “I wouldn’t mind.”

Or, from the WIP - the next chapter of A Place Not Far Away - because my favorite is often what I’m currently working on, there’s this! Enjoy? <3

They both watch Sebastian for a second; he’s nodding, jotting down a quote, hair bouncing with the motion. His fingers are quick and tanned, gathering notes; his jacket’s casually open, and dirt’s left a scuff on his right boot.

He’s a New York City reporter in a black leather jacket and a stylish sweater, but he’s also a reporter who doesn’t mind getting dirty and will run through a corn maze and helped set out signs the first day Chris ever met him.

Carly pats Chris’s shoulder, says, “Enjoy yourself,” and heads off to supervise some historical blacksmith demonstrations. The sky shimmers in clouds and satin and magic and unfallen rain.

Sebastian bounces back over. “That’ll be fantastic, she was so excited, she’s already thinking about next year, which is so perfect for a pull quote, and it’ll get people thinking ahead about coming here then!”

Would you come back, Chris doesn’t say. Would you come back next year, next month, next week, even if your story’s done? Would you stay and not leave?

He can’t ask that. This is Sebastian’s job.

He says, “That’s awesome. You want lunch?”

“Absolutely. I haven’t eaten my way through your menu yet. Recommendations?”

“Classic Oktoberfest? The whole German sausage, potato, onion thing? That one’s popular. And, um, baked apples. In maple cream sauce.” Food. He can talk about food. Promoting their menu. Not getting down on both knees and promising to bring home every pumpkin Sebastian likes, if that’ll make those happy eyes stay at his side.

“Sounds good.” Sebastian’s eyebrows go up, beckoning Chris into the joke. “And I do like sausage.”

“I like your sausage,” Chris tells him, and Sebastian’s laugh is a splash of sunshine through clouds and cold and tree-branches that stretch to the sky.

#fanfic ask thing!#meme thing #musette22 #yay!#my fic #evanstan #stucky #cherik #mcfassy

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data-true-blog · 6 years

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Dialogus - A dialogue engine for Unity

I’ve been working on a dialogue engine for Unity (specifically, 2018.2.6) over the past few weeks that can be used in two different projects. I still have some work to do but I feel like I have a good starting point to discuss and post about it. If you want to see my progress, here’s a link to the Trello board I’m working on.

I’ve been working on a little thing called Dialogus which, as I said earlier, is a dialogue engine. It provides a large part of the back end for dialogue systems other than the actual dialogue UI itself. That part is up to the specific game to implement for things such as animations on the sprites, text animations, dialogue boxes, etc. Dialogus takes care of a lot of the heavy back end issues that are seen when trying to program your own dialogue tool in Unity. There are still a few things I want to add to the tool before I push it out and I want to test it on a larger game.

Originally, at least for one of the projects, I was going to use a system similar to what Brackey’s describes in this video. While this is in no way a bad system, if you’re using it for an expansive project, it can become quite cumbersome and disorganized. A few people from my college also tried implementing a variation of Brackey’s tool but quickly found that nesting things became ugly and worked poorly in the long run.

I knew I needed to write a tool that can be used in different types of games with different requirements. The project I am working on for Fishhead (a currently unnamed 2.5D platformer with dating sim elements) requires that it be useful in cut scenes and player/NPC interactions. For The Souls’ Sonata, from Mirror Studio, it’s going to be used in a visual novel setting. This means the engine will have to be optimized for lots of text, dialogue, and voice over work. In both cases, the dialogue tree presents a real challenge as it is the crux of both games.

Editor Features

The editor for Dialogus features a few things: a character creator, a variable declarer, and the all-essential dialogue tree editor. I’ll talk about each of these individually. I apologize now for only showing screenshots; I’m not too aware on the best way to record and make such in-engine presentations look good.

Character Creator

The character creator is a simple, lightweight aspect of Dialogus that has the sole purpose of containing each of the character’s names and sprites. It is a simple, inspector-based gadget that can automatically find the sprites of the character or allow you as the user to input your own sprites. I plan to expand this aspect to use custom folder paths but for now it works simply.

Dialogue Tree Editor

The Dialogue Tree Editor is the most interesting part to the entire tool. It allows users to build their trees up without code. The trees only rely on the Character Creator tool if you have sprites you want to use. You can still use the tool without a CHAR_X file or files, it just exists for the sake of making life easier when linking sprites to specific instances.

The editor currently supports three types of nodes: start, conversation, and choice.

The start node is the simplest of the three: it acts as the initial position to the rest of the tree. If all goes well, it should hopefully be Node 0 in the tree but some things happen and it isn’t. The editor does not allow you to place any other nodes until the start node has been placed.

The conversation node is the pivotal node as it is what most games will rely on. I also bet it will be the most nodes in a single tree unless you have a questionnaire or something similar.

The choice node is the next most interesting node and is the last of the three to have been implemented. The choice node currently supports up to 8 possible branches/choices/paths. Below is a sample from a quick test from within the editor.

Variable Editor

The Variable Editor is a very simple tool, similar to that of the Character Creator. It allows you to create and initialize variables to specific values. Say you want a money counter or to see if the player has a certain item or if you want paths to be limited based off of a relationship with a given character, you’d use the variable editor to make these. As well, you can use these in the connection editor to direct pathing as stated just over a sentence ago.

Connection Editor

The Connection Editor is a simple little window similar to that of the variable editor. You left-click on a connection and you can pull up the window to it. Here, you can add any number of conditions to the path as you’d like. For right now, the conditions must all be met but I do plan on allowing conditionals where one of the conditions need to be met. This will be implemented sooner than later, in fact.

Back-end Information

Dialogus uses NetwonSoft’s JSON library as information is represented in the JSON format (because XML is just a pain for this case IMO). This is the library’s only dependency as it has been tested for years at this point and is widely trusted for JSON de-serialization.

Why not use Unity’s in-engine deserialize components? Simply because it’s support is far more limited. As the tool is further in development, and better ideas are found/implemented, the tool may switch to the lighter-weight Unity packages.

Dialogus has it’s own loader/tree traversal methods that you can call. The only function programmers need to worry about is NextNode(Node).

How does this differentiate from tools like Fungus?

Fungus is a general purpose engine that has the ability to be used in visual novels and games alike. The issue I found with it is it relies on Lua programming and it’s organization for conversations can be quite cumbersome. Dialogus removes a bit of these issues because it allows for each node to be seen and edited rather than hunting inside each of the nodes to find the specific conversation piece.

Why should I use this tool instead of something like RenPy?

You don’t have to use Python.

...

I kid, Python is a good language for certain tasks. It’s a tool in the tool belt that should always be considered.

In reality, it’s a good way to enable freedom for visual novel games. RenPy I find to be limiting in its own right. It’s documentation is something I also have an issue with as it is lacking compared to other resources. Of course, this will be improved over time hopefully. While it’s great for some types of visual novels, it is limited in its capacity to serve other functions for more ambitious VNs. Unity affords you such freedom to experiment and write your own systems. This tool takes care of the daunting task and question of “how do I write a dialogue tree in Unity?”

Are there any plans to support animations in the dialogues?

There are plans to support basic animation stuff (like ‘shaking,’ ‘jumping,’ etc.) however it’s a very, very low priority. There are better things that the tool can use over animations at this point but they may very well come.

What do I have to write/create?

The only scripts you have to write are a manager script to interact with Dialogus’s external facing tools. You have access to Dialogus’s node types (using enum values) as the traverser returns a generic Node object rather than a specific instance of the node. You also have to make your own GUI system (supplying Text for strings and RawImage objects for sprites). Dialogus acts as a way to hold data you need for interactions.

At the very end of the development, I plan on writing a basic dialogue manager so that way people who are not programming savy can quickly implement their dialogue trees while they wait for programmers to free up.

When will the tool be available on the Unity Asset store and will it be paid for?

Not too sure, but it isn’t gong to take another good month or two of development to get there when it’ll be available but I’m even more unsure of whether or not to monetize the tool. It will definitely go to the Asset store once I feel it is ready though.

Challenges Ahead

There are a few things that I’m particularly seeing as obstacles the tool will have to overcome:

Translation/multi-language games: Currently Dialogus only supports one tree language at a time be it English, Arabic, Japanese, Spanish, or Russian. I need to solve the issue of how to have one tree with the ability to use any language. This may come down to reworking many of the lower systems in the tool itself.

Optimizations: While general optimizations can (and very much will) happen, the issue comes down to optimizing how files are saved, loaded, read, etc. These could potentially throw off older versions of Dialogus and prevent newer versions from being able to read old data. The basic solution to this is use only the version you have downloaded on the project but I want to do some more testing on this.

External Issues: My biggest fear comes down to managing the project properly. I’m still just a student at this point so exams and the like come first but, more importantly, dealing with burnout. With so many tasks to do outside of this project, Dialogus will be a slow growing tool until the end of this semester.

Breaking the Unix development style: I want Dialogus to be an amazing dialogue engine. That means I don’t want it to do anything else other than that. Some features will have to be tossed out that I plan, or others want, simply because it breaks the Unix cycle. I’m one person working on this right now.

#unity3d #unitytools #dialogus #the souls' sonata #mirror studio #fishhead #dialogue engine #c-sharp

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douchebagbrainwaves · 4 years

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HERE'S WHAT I JUST REALIZED ABOUT ADVICE

Would it be so bad to add a new application to my list of known time sinks: Firefox. If you consider exclamation points as constituents, for example: after the founders graduated from college, they borrowed $15,000 from their friend's rich uncle, who they give 5% of the company in restricted stock, vesting over four years, and the living expenses of the founders quits. And I don't think there's any limit to the number of startups per capita is probably a 20th of what it might have been.1 I'd sacrifice a large percentage of the income for the extra peace of mind. And it only does a fraction of them.2 9998 Subject free 0.3 Ask anyone who's done it. Their unconscious mind decides for them, it's a vote of no confidence. Some angel investors join together in syndicates.

An optimism shield has to be tuned just right. How do you learn it? The best way to explain how it all works is to follow the case of a hypothetical very fortunate startup as it shifts gears through successive rounds. And while startup hubs are as powerful magnets as ever, the increasing cheapness of web startups will if anything increase the importance of startup hubs, but the title of one: James Salter's Burning the Days. You're not all playing a zero-sum game. Fortunately there's someone you can ask each for advice about the other. But perhaps worst of all, the complex sentences and fancy words give you, the bullshit that sneaks into your life by tricking you is no one's fault but your own. 8 books to choose from, the quantity would definitely seem limited, no matter how finished you thought it was. The most dangerous thing about our dislike of schleps is that much of it is unconscious. Few legal documents are created from scratch.4 Err on the side while working on their day jobs, but which never got anywhere and was gradually abandoned.

The angel deal takes two weeks to close, so you start to lie to yourself. The effort that goes into looking productive is not merely that it's longer. There are theoretical arguments for giving these two tokens substantially different probabilities Pantel and Lin stemmed the tokens, meaning they reduced e. Promising new startups are often discovered by developers. It's not what they originally set out to do—in the process of innovation. After my mother died, I wished I'd spent more time with her. Of course, looking at multiple token sequences would catch it easily.5

So verbs with initial caps have higher spam probabilities than they would in all lowercase. No one proposes that there's some limit to the number of people who want to work for them. A month later, at the end of month six, the system is starting to have a new kind of stock representing the total pool of companies they were managing. If anything major is broken—if they sense you're ambivalent, they won't give you much attention. 7 uncle 50 4. What would be a good heuristic for product design, and others where it would help to be rapacious is when growth depends on that. 5 million from angels without ever accepting vesting, largely because we were so inexperienced that we were appalled at the idea.

Partly the reason deals seem to fall through so often is that you know you're making something at least one has to make money.6 The danger of the second paragraph is not merely annoying; the prickly attitude of these posers can actually slow the process of innovation. Indeed, the whole concept seemed foreign to them. What's wrong with having one founder, like Oracle, usually turn out to be good, because it was some project a couple guys started on the side.7 Founders at Work. We have three general suggestions about hiring: a don't do it if you let them. For example, everyone I've talked to while writing this essay felt the same about English classes—that anything can be interesting if you get deeply enough into it. But what if your manager was hit by a bus? You can no longer guess what will work; you have to take enough to get to the next step is.8 But even factoring in their annoying eccentricities, the disobedient attitude of hackers is a net win. Then you'd automatically get your share of the returns of the whole economy.9

I wasn't paying attention, I didn't know what they'd be like.10 Way more startups hose themselves than get crushed by competitors.11 This is what real productivity looks like. And because this is what I call degeneration. Our ancestors were giants. We can of course counter by sending a crawler to look at the instruments. When they demo it, one of the motives on the FBI's list.

They would just look at you blankly. And the hardest part of that is often discarding your old idea. And don't write the way they are because that is how things have to be smart too, right?12 It used to be aware of this problem.13 But you can't browse the web. There's a whole essay's worth of surprises there for sure. It's the concluding remarks to the jury.

This may work in biotech, where a lot of pain and stress to do something that would otherwise seem too ambitious.14 I remember going through this realization myself. So if our group of founders have something they can launch.15 This is no accident. The spirit of resistance to government, Jefferson wrote, is so valuable on certain occasions, that I wish it always to be kept alive. If life is short, we should expect its shortness to take us by surprise. I feel as if someone snuck a television onto my desk. This had two drawbacks: a an expert on literature need not himself be a good heuristic for product design, and others wouldn't.16

Notes

If an investor? Maybe that isn't the last round of funding rounds are bad news; it is very common for startups. If Ron Conway had angel funds starting in the US.

Mayle, Peter, Why Are We Getting a Divorce? The word suggests an undifferentiated slurry, but if you hadn't written it?

Most of the fatal pinch where your idea is to be very hard and doesn't get paid to work not just the location of the reasons startups are ready to invest in your own time, because software takes longer to close than you expect.

This is an understatement. VCs aren't tech guys, the best approach is to be hidden from statistics too.

For example, the switch in the sense of the twentieth century, art as brand split apart from art is not much to generalize. This technique wouldn't work for us! Their inexperience makes them overbuild: they'll create huge, overcomplicated agreements, and mostly in Perl.

Vision research may be overpaid. For the price of a running back doesn't translate to soccer. But try this thought experiment: If they were.

And since there are only doing angel deals to generate revenues they could attribute to malice what can be said to have moments of adversity before they ultimately choose not to make fundraising take less time, is a trap set by evil companies for the same work faster. Which is not so much on luck. This flattering distinction seems so natural to the home team, I've become a function of their predecessors and said in effect what the startup eventually becomes. The danger is that you decide the price of an official authority makes all the East Coast.

One-click ordering, however, you need to raise money on the spot, so x% usage growth predicts x% revenue growth, because the danger of chasing large investments is not yet released. Some blue counties are false positives caused by blacklists, I was a refinement that made it possible to bring corporate bonds to market faster; the crowds of shoppers drifting through this huge mall reminded George Romero of zombies.

Surely no one knows how many computers the worm infected, because some schools work hard to imagine how an investor seems very interested in us! Oddly enough, maybe they'll listen to God.

Don't be evil.

I was there when it was more rebellion which can vary a lot of startups where the richest of their upbringing in their closets. Perl. What they must do is leave them alone in the past, it's because other companies made all the potential magnitude of the most, it's shocking how much they liked the outdoors, was no great risk in doing something that conforms with their decision or just outright dismisses it and make a formal language for proofs in which you want to lead.

Applets seemed to Aristotle the core: the quality of production. Because the pledge is deliberately vague, we're going to give up, and unleashed a swarm of cheap component suppliers on Apple hardware. Actually, someone else to lend to, so we also give any startup that wants to the World Bank, the owner shouldn't pay me extra for doing badly and is doomed anyway.

The reason not to like uncapped notes, VCs who are weak in other Lisp dialects: Here's an example of a safe environment, but in practice money raised as convertible debt, so it's conceivable that the lies people told 100 years will be big successes but who are both. But wide-area bandwidth increased more than they have to preserve their wealth by forbidding the export of gold or silver. This plan backfired with the bad idea the way they do on the software business.

Fortuna! Algorithms that use it are called naive Bayesian.

A Bayesian Approach to Filtering Junk E-Mail. Currently the lowest rate seems to be delivering results.

You know what kind of protection is one you take out order.

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andymatuschak · 7 years

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Successful habits through smoothly ratcheting targets

Adopting new habits is hard! What a shame: New Year’s resolutions could represent such a bright spark of optimism. Instead, they’re a clichéd punchline on the futility of human will. Certainly, my own past attempts have deserved those jokes!

But in 2017, I shifted strategies and successfully built four new habits (of five attempted): piano practice, internetless mornings, carbless workdays, and meditation. In past years I’d feel lucky if I built just one new habit! I’d like to share my approach: smoothly ratcheted targets, in moving weekly windows, with teeth. Before I unpack that, let’s cover some background.

Most people seem to attempt habits informally, deploying only hope and good intentions. Alas: that doesn’t work very reliably—or at least it certainly doesn’t for me! More serious approaches typically employ one of two formal strategies: chaining, or scheduling.

Chaining is basically “cold turkey” habit adoption: start doing it every day—and don’t break your chain! This approach combines an incentive system (maintaining streaks) with an adoption system (“start doing it every day!”). Streaks can offer a powerful incentive for an established habit, but they do little for fragile new habits. It’s the adoption strategy that really matters initially, yet “start doing it every day!” is a brittle—and, to me, unrealistic—adoption strategy.

Seeing that daily compliance is too ambitious, others try scheduling their habits: let’s play piano on Monday and Thursday nights! In my experience, this works intermittently, but it’s ultimately too brittle in the face of a life I’d want to live. Say Thursday rolls around, and over lunch, a friend invites me to an interesting evening event. No problem: the spirit of my goal would be satisfied if I practiced over the weekend instead. But because I’m depending on explicit scheduling to trigger practice, now I have to actually move a calendar event. That’s high-friction, so instead I just accidentally drop the ball until next Monday. Others tell me this matches their experience.

I’ve found that to reliably adopt a habit, I need a strategy that bends, not breaks, while still holding me accountable over time. It should supply pressure smoothly and flexibly.

So now I start each habit with a low weekly goal: e.g. meditate once per week, any day. That bar is low enough that I don’t have to schedule it or do anything special. Once that stabilizes, I ratchet up the target frequency.

This sounds pretty simple, but I found there are some important subtleties which have made implementation tricky. I’ll outline the key issues now before describing my own solution.

Smooth pressure demands moving windows: make every day doable

Being human, I’d often put off my habits to the end of the week. That worked reasonably well until some goals targeted three days per week. Then it was way too easy to end up in this trap:

To avoid trapping myself, I’d have to perform a sort of time traveling lookahead each day. “Will I accidentally back myself into a corner if I don’t do the habit today?” It felt like my system had pointy edges I had to be careful of.

I’ve found that smooth pressure demands we ensure that every day is doable. There should never be an “impossible” day like the one I illustrated above!

We can make that happen if we use moving weekly windows instead of calendar weeks. Every day, look back a week and make sure you hit your goal within that 7-day window. A moving weekly window prevents us from reaching the situation I illustrated above because on Friday, it would have made clear that we needed a check:

With a moving weekly window, I can tackle habits on whichever days seem best, but I always get a clear warning when today is a “jeopardy” day. I don’t have to look into the future to figure out whether I’ll be able to hit my goal.

Smooth ratcheting and flexibility through fine-grained targets

When it’s time to ratchet up the target, adding one day per week to a habit can feel like a huge change! I find that fine-grained values work better when possible. For my piano practice, I don’t use “numbers of days practiced per week”: I use “number of minutes practiced per week.” I barely notice adding ten minutes per week to the goal, so I can smoothly ratchet up my target.

These fine-grained values also offer more flexibility. Say I want two hours a week of practice. That could be two big weekend practice sessions, or 15–20 minutes per day, or a 1-hour session with a couple smaller sessions. All those configurations hit my target, but the flexibility helps me maintain specific goals in the face of my shifting daily interest and availability.

Give the goals teeth

Accountability is powerful! Certainly, in the workplace, I find I achieve my goals more reliably when I have some real skin in the game. The same appears to be true for personal habits.

There are lots of ways to arrange accountability; I suspect this is probably the least important specific of my approach. It’s probably only important that there be some consequence to slipping, or maybe some incentive for not slipping. Maybe a “don’t break the chain!” incentive would be enough for my habits at this point.

I’ve arranged to lose a small amount of money ($10–$30) when I miss a goal. I only had to pay a couple times in 2017. It’s strange how effective that threat is once a habit is reasonably stable. I’m fortunate that this isn’t an amount of money I’d stress about, but I feel so indignant about losing money for stupid reasons that the threat keeps me on track. I’d probably feel similar motivation from some mechanism which loudly texts my friends when I fail.

Implementing the habit goals

I’m not a “quantified self” adherent, and I’m not interested in graphs or an elaborate dashboard for my habits. But the mechanism I’ve described is complicated enough that a tool really helps implementation. I really only need a small piece of software to tell me “hey! you need to do X habit today!”—and to hold me accountable if I don’t. Occasionally I want to ask a hypothetical like “if I don’t do it today, what would that force the next few days to look like?”

The best tool I’ve found for implementing this strategy is Beeminder, which happily handles all the nuances I’ve described above. Unfortunately, I always have to add an asterisk when I mention it: Beeminder’s great; it’s truly changed my life; yet it’s the highest-friction, least-polished software I regularly use. Most of my friends who’ve tried it can’t get past its interface. This is a shame, but I encourage you, dear reader, to push past the design problems and give it a try anyway.

I’ve looked at many alternatives. Some are very nicely designed! Unfortunately, all are missing at least one of the attributes I described above; in particular, I haven’t found another with the running window, and most lack an accountability mechanism.

So far, I’ve successfully restrained myself from building my own tool. That’s a dangerous yak to shave! But if you find another tool which can implement the behaviors I describe, please do let me know.

I’m about to start a few new habits in 2018, and I’m excited because after last year’s success, I think they might actually stick. Best of luck with your own habits, and happy new year!

#habits #beeminder

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dansphlevels · 7 years

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flower shop au?

Yellow Roses Pt. 1 of 6

Summary: Dan has a wife who just loves the bouquets of flowers he keeps getting for her. Unfortunately, she doesn’t know about the attractive florist who sends hidden messages with each bouquet that her husband might just be falling for.

Length: 1.7k words

Theme: historical, flower shop au, forbidden love, language of flowers

Daniel had never been prouder than on his wedding day.

He had found himself a wife- a beautiful woman named Rose- and everyone congratulated him on his accomplishment. This was in a time when women still lacked certain rights, and heterosexual marriage was a must. So Daniel was beaming as everyone he knew congratulated him on his beautiful wife.

There was one person who didn’t seem so impressed, and it was likely the least important person at the party.

“Ironic,” the florist, a tall, raven haired man named Phil said. “Yellow roses. At a wedding.”

He had said this quietly enough that no one but Dan could hear. “Did you say something?” He scoffed, giving the man a chance to take back his words.

“Yellow roses. You don’t know what they mean, do you?”

And Daniel didn’t. But after the wedding, at the first opportunity, he sent one of the boys who worked on his estate to fetch him a book on the meaning of flowers. Daniel was quite well off, of course- how else would he get such a lovely wife? And surely enough, in the book, under ‘yellow roses’, it had but one word; jealousy.

So it was ironic, he supposed, having flowers that symbolized jealousy at a wedding. But it wasn’t the florist’s job to point it out, and be the sore spot in what would have been a perfect day. Dan decided he would find this man, no, this boy, and have a little talk with him.

He sent the estate boy out once more with a message for the florist, requesting a lovely bouquet for his wife. And then he waited.

The bouquet was hand delivered by said florist, Phil, right to the doorstep of Dan’s home. “No yellow roses this time. Glad you learned your lesson.”

“You were the one who requested the roses last time,” Phil said with a gleam in his eyes, “but this time, I made the bouquet that I thought was more appropriate. I hope you enjoy them.”

Daniel took the flowers, and glanced behind him, making sure no one was watching. “I… acquired a book on the meaning of flowers. I see why you found it so funny.”

“Yes,” the florist hummed, “then I’m sure you’ll love these flowers. Your wife’s name is Rose, yes? Then there are some flowers… for your flower.” He chuckled at his own joke.

Dan paid him off and brought the flowers inside- not to his wife’s chambers, but to his own study, where he pulled out the book of flowers. In the vase were cute yellow flowers, but not roses, along with flowers that we spiky and orange. After quickly looking them up in the book, Daniel found that they were yellow carnations and orange butterfly weed. They were quite lovely, he had to admit that, but their meanings were disgraceful. Phil knew these flowers were for his wife, how dare he!

Yellow carnations represented rejection, and distain. And butterfly weed expressed the words ‘leave me’. Daniel gave them to his wife, despite the horrid meanings, as he knew they would mean nothing to her, but he felt quite awful about it. He might have been over thinking it- but, there was something wrong about giving your wife flowers that basically spelled out ‘I don’t like you, go away.’

Rose loved them, completely ignorant of the meanings, the meaning that Phil knew and intentionally arranged to make Dan mad. Why- Dan would just have to speak with him once more.

“I hope these are better,” Daniel said with distaste. “I looked up the meaning.”

“I hoped you would,” Phil said slyly, pushing away his fringe. “Distain and dismissal. Perfect for a new wife.”

Daniel scowled. “What do you have against my wife?”

“Nothing,” he corrected himself, straightening a bit. “Against your wife. I just prefer…. not women.”

They were alone, yet Daniel’s heart seemed to jump out of his skin. “Quiet! Someone might hear you!”

“Someone did hear me. You just did.”

“Well, I’m different, I-”

“Yes?”

Dan shook his head. “Here’s your money. Just go.”

Taking the money, Phil turned, but then stopped, glancing back at Dan. “One more thing. These flowers…”

“Yes?”

“They aren’t meant for your wife. The meaning…. is for you.”

And then he was gone. And Daniel was left with a bouquet of pink and purple roses.

—–

They were actually peach and lavender, Dan soon found out upon consulting his book. He also looked up the meanings, as always, and wasn’t sure if his book was accurate or not. Maybe Phil had a different reference, or perhaps he thought the flowers were different than what he thought they were.

“These flowers… aren’t meant for your wife,” Phil had said. “The meaning… is for you.”

What was that supposed to mean? Dan must be wrong. Surely…. surely it was an accident.

According to the book, peach roses represented different things, depending on if they were pale peach or not. Dan wasn’t sure what these were, but pale peach stood for modesty, and normal peach stood for “Appreciation, sincerity, ‘let’s get together’, and gratitude”, Dan read out loud. “So, basically they could be used to humbly ask someone out.”

It was a weird choice of flowers, for sure. But the other flowers were even stranger. “Lavender roses stand for… love at first sight or enchantment.”

“Daniel?” Someone asked, making him literally jump in his seat. “Who are you talking to?”

“Just myself, Sweetheart,” Dan said through his teeth. He’d forgotten he was in the parlor, not in his study.

“Oh,” Rose said, looking at the items in front of Dan. “More flowers? For me?”

Actually, they’re mine, Dan thought, but obviously that wasn’t right. “Yes my dear, roses. Did you know they symbolize love?”

She giggled, taking the bouquet and admiring it flimsily. “You’ve always been so peculiar,” she teased, “though I suppose it’s why I love you.”

Yes, that and the fact that your parents wanted you married before you became an old maid, Dan thought bitterly. And I just happened to have the biggest house out of your suitors.

But he didn’t say that. Instead, he smiled at his wife, and gave her a small kiss.

“I do love all the flowers I’ve been receiving lately,” Rose said, still smiling at the roses. “It’s very kind of you.”

“Yes, well, I’m sure you’ll be getting many more.”

—-

And she did. Rose got all of the flowers that Dan bought, and Dan did buy many. Each order took a few days to complete, and then had to be hand delivered to his house, which was a bit of a ways from town.

After the roses, Dan sent in another request, though this time he specified the flowers he wanted: ‘a mixture of yellow chrysanthemums and stripes carnations’.

However, when Phil came to the door a few days later, he did not hold the flowers that represented 'optimism and a long life’, 'loyal love’, and 'refusal’. Instead he held a bouquet of bright red chrysanthemums, which Dan already knew the meaning of; love.

“I think you miswrote your order, Daniel.”

“It’s Mr. Howell.”

“Anyways, I corrected it for you. I hope you enjoy them.”

“They’re for my wife.”

Phil took the money from his hand and tipped his hat, leaving.

Phil didn’t seem to get that Dan was married, and therefore uninterested. He kept on sending him more and more beautiful flowers, dazzling arrangements of roses and tulips, yellow hydrangeas and white hyacinths. Dan kept on ordering flowers, requesting flowers that meant 'rejection’ and 'loyalty’, and receiving flowers that meant 'love’ and 'romance’. Dan had to admit, he found their little game rather…. charming.

Finally, one day, Dan sent a message different from the others. He requested a mix of roses, which his book described as saying “I don’t know what my feelings are yet but I sure do like you enough to send you roses.” Or, in this case, “I like you enough to buy roses from you.” It didn’t matter. Dan was sure the meaning would come across.

He wrote the flower request and went out to find the boy who worked on the estate, the same boy that he always gave the flower requests to. He was a sweet boy who never doubted him, and with whom he trusted the letters with, though they were somewhat coded. But Dan couldn’t find him.

“Rose?” He asked, rushing into the parlor where his wife sat with her lady friends, having tea. “Do you know where the estate boy is? I can’t find him.”

An uncomfortable blush rose on his wife’s cheeks. “Let’s speak outside, by the gardens.”

His wife was speaking code too, but not about flowers. Her code translated to: Let’s talk about it somewhere else, where my friends can’t hear.

Outside, in the company of the gardens- though the flowers were hardly comparable to Phil’s- his wife turned to him firmly. For a second, Dan worried she knew something of the messages he’d been sending, but when she spoke, it was about something different altogether. “I caught the estate boy… fraternizing… with the boy who works in the stables. I told him to pack his things, and I wanted to tell you so you could fire him.”

Icy raced up Dan’s spine. “They were… fraternizing?”

“Kissing,” Rose clarified, clearly horrified at the image of two boys touching lips. “You must call the authorities; have them locked up for their crimes. I feel… horrible, so horrible, knowing that I’ve let this happen for so long without realizing it.”

“Yes, thank you for telling me,” Dan mumbled. “I’ll have to… take care of it.”

His wife thanked him and went inside, back to the ladies waiting for her. But Dan went, instead, to the stables. “Give this to the florist, the tall one-”

“From the wedding?” The boy interjected.

“Don’t interrupt,” Dan warned. “You’re in enough trouble already.”

Dan stayed and watched as the boy saddled up a horse to leave. He stayed still, watching the young man, the gay young man, ride away, the letter in his bag. Mixed roses- confused feelings, but feelings none the less.

Dan didn’t know how he felt. But he knew that he did feel something, and whatever that something was was definitely illegal. He should stop contacting the florist. He should pretend whatever it was that happened within him, doesn’t happen again.

But he couldn’t help but wait in anticipation for the flowers to arrive.

Part 2 / Fic Masterpost / Ao3

#flowershop au #flowers #language of flowers #secret love #forbidden love #answered #oneshot #dan and phil #cluelesslester #meaning of flowers #yellow roses #dansPHlevels #fanfic #fanfiction #phanfic #phanfiction #phan #prompt #prompts

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waqasblog2 · 5 years

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Don’t Get Duped: Key Questions to Ask Before Hiring an SEO Company

How your business chooses an SEO agency is important.

But it can be pretty tricky.

Modern business demands a credible online presence.

Yet, shysters seem to lurk behind every web page, just waiting to pounce.

This post is for any business owner that knows they need SEO but is wary of getting scammed.

Entrepreneurs are smart to be skeptical.

If you don’t understand our industry, your local “SEO expert” might just take you for a ride.

Or worse yet, some shady overseas “SEO agency” may just reel you in with an irrefutable offer and then ruin your domain name forever.

That’s not to say that all one-man SEOs or foreign agencies lack search optimization skills and need to get over on people.

However, plenty of them do.

If you aren’t careful, your website, brand, and business may be forfeit.

But before you start throwing questions their way, make sure you’re actually prepared for the answers you might receive.

Make sure you start with a little introspection.

Questions For Yourself

Few business owners actually understand how search engine optimization works.

So even if you’re looking for an SEO agency, the technicalities are not where you should focus.

Instead, entrepreneurs should concentrate on running their business and completing goals.

To this end, their several questions any business owner should answer about their own business before they even consider selecting a digital marketing company.

What is our value proposition?

It’s crucial that any online marketing you do is centered by a value proposition that sets you apart.

What does the ideal online sales cycle look like for us?

Your focal point might be an online store, generating phone calls, growing an email list, or something else.

Your particular combination will be based on your brand and industry.

How much is each new customer worth to us over their lifetime?

Customer acquisition is the name of the game in Internet marketing.

A real understanding of what new customers are worth helps you answer related questions regarding the budget.

What level of success have we had with online marketing so far?

Your brand’s online history is an important part of the SEO equation.

Age is a big deal to the search engines as well as users.

That’s why this question helps establish perspective.

What are our (short and long-term) goals?

Balance your goal timeline and always keep perspective on what is most important.

Quick hit SEO is not the way to go.

The power in understanding these aspects of your business is two-fold:

First, any good SEO consultant or company is going to ask these questions, so be prepared to provide answers.

Indeed, the presence of a well-designed Discovery Page indicates that a company designs custom campaigns for their clients.

Second, knowing these answers will give context to the questions you’ll be asking during the interview process.

But before we get around to putting these questions to prospective agencies, let’s go ahead and eliminate as many unfit candidates as possible.

Prescreening SEO Services

There’s no reason to talk to an SEO who you don’t trust or already know isn’t the right fit.

So, doing research up front will save you time (and headache) down the road.

If you’re researching Internet marketing companies, it only makes sense to use the Web to screen them.

Luckily, the modern Net is quick to volunteer information on businesses and brands.

We say your first three filters should be Rankings, Reviews, and Reaction.

Not every good SEO company will focus on all three, but if they can’t do any of these right for themselves, it’s hard to imagine they could get them right for your brand.

The place to start though is quite logical.

Rankings: Search Engine Results

The most obvious way to prove that you can help a business rank for their keywords is to rank for your own.

If you’re looking for local results, you can search by your industry, ie. “dental marketing Atlanta”, “SEO for lawyers Atlanta”, etc. and see who turns up on the first page.

These “showcase keywords” are one of the primary ways search marketing companies jockey for position in front of potential clients.

However, this requires ample resources.

Many SEO choose not to fight that battle.

And they don’t have to when their client’s rankings are enough.

Reviews: Online Reputation

For the last few years, Internet reviews have had the power to make or break businesses.

But now, online reviews are even factored into search algorithms.

So when you’re looking through reviews of potential agencies, you’re also performing a basic component of the modern web presence audit.

Realize that great testimonials are the ultimate marketing tool.

For SEO, look for them on Google My Business, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

But be on the lookout for fake ones.

Many companies see the value and pay for reviews from places like fiverr.com.

It can be hard to pick out the genuine article unless you know what to look for.

That’s partly where the next filter comes in.

Reaction: The “Gut Check”

One of the main things you want to do when you seek out SEO companies is to analyze their marketing at an emotional level.

How does it make you feel?

Emotion plays a big role in marketing.

Remember that the company you choose will be creating marketing campaigns that represent your brand.

If you don’t feel they’ll help you connect with your audience, you’ll want to choose someone else.

In theory, they’ll be responsible for doing the same thing for your brand.

This filter is all about trust.

It’s no guarantee, but it is a good start.

You still have to get the marketing consultant on the phone and:

Ask the Right Questions

The questions you should ask should have less to do with SEO strategy and more to do with legitimacy and fit.

You could almost say we’re still screening here.

Look for Red Flags

Some questions you’ll ask to weed out shady companies and don’t listen to SEO myths.

Many of these are tests.

You’re looking for specific answers and if you don’t get them, you know that the company you’re interviewing doesn’t practice top-tier search engine optimization.

This is where you separate the real SEO from the SEO salesmen.

Start here because there is no such thing as “good, cheap SEO” anymore.

Today, this is the first tell-tale sign that an agency doesn’t prioritize sustainability.

Can you guarantee we get to the number one spot for our best keyword?

Guarantees in SEO are sketchy.

The fact is, no one knows exactly how Google’s algorithms work on any given day.

So promising the top spot is always risky business.

How fast will you get us ranked?

Mentioning “easy wins” is one thing.

But legit SEO timetables are a really difficult thing to come by.

Predictability in SEO is at an all-time low.

Beware those that say otherwise.

How many backlinks are you going to build me?

In this case, you’re looking for shysters to betray themselves with answers like “100s” or “1000s”.

That type of answer reflects an outdated and limited understanding of SEO.

How do you handle communication and reporting?

It’s important that you know your contact person within the company you’ll be working with.

On top of that, legitimate agencies provide periodic reporting on rankings and other info.

Do you always follow Google’s best practices?

If you encounter an SEO with blatant disregard for what the search giant has to say, run the other way.

They are begging for penalties.

And so are their clients.

With this one, you’re looking for unrealistic claims not otherwise listed.

Here, the SEO salesmen hit you with unrefusable offers.

Open the door and see their true colors.

If they can make it through this batch of questions without raising any alarms, it’s time to move on to the real interview.

Find the Fit

Just because they are legit doesn’t mean their business is a match for yours.

You want to make sure that they can represent your brand the way it should be.

So you need to ask questions that pertain to your business.

But the conversation should be open on both ends.

This is where you can expect those questions you answered about your own business to come up.

As you’ll notice, this last set of questions requires they know a bit about your business.

What kind of SEO work do you do?

Modern SEO is an expansive topic.

Effective optimization plans are based on the business they are designed for.

Some agencies specialize in one area of SEO, others do it all.

Can we see samples of work for similar clients?

If you’ve properly prescreened your list of potential SEO, you might already have all the examples you need.

Either way, try to find someone with experience in your industry.

How will your work tie into our other marketing efforts/industry?

Any SEO firm that you choose to work with will need to mold their tactics and strategies to fit your business.

Focus on how well the consultant integrates your vision into the answer.

How do you typically determine success?

Your marketing consultant should be looking to build on the ideas you have for your brand online.

So when it comes to goals, you want an SEO that lines theirs up with yours.

Depending on your business and the plan your chosen expert has in mind, there may be more specific questions you should ask.

Don’t be afraid to be creative with your inquiry.

Just try not to journey too deep down the rabbit hole of search ranking theory.

Final Takeaway

If you use this post as a blueprint, you’ll be able to select an SEO with confidence.

What you want is a tough decision between several great agencies.

If you’ve gone through the entire process and can’t decide, return to the “Reaction” phase of the prescreening process and go with your gut.

As long as you’ve focused on finding legitimate digital consultants whose marketing strategies and expertise are compatible with your brand, you’ve done your due diligence.

If you feel that YEAH! Local might fit the bill for your business, please get the conversation started today via our Discovery Page.

Also, if you’ve found this post helpful, please share it on your social media network to help others make smart digital marketing decisions. Or, if you have a question or another excellent question to ask prospective agencies, please comment below!

Don’t Get Duped: Key Questions to Ask Before Hiring an SEO Company

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Hey! I'm Justin Herring, co-founder at YEAH! Local. Having been burned by SEO companies in the past I decided to start my own focused on "Results".

This content was originally published here.

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onlyonemister · 8 years

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Making a Game: What’s in a Roll?

Before we jump into anything, I need to get this out of the way: we are not going to pick a dice rolling system in this article. I know, I said last time that we would be talking about dice, and we will be, but I am not ready to pick the system for rolling that Vikings and Valkyries will use quite yet. Given that dice rolls are the primary way players will interact with the system rules themselves, this is a pretty big decision, and not one that I am prepared to make so early in the development process. Every dice system is going to be best for specific kinds of results and gameplay systems. I will need to spend some time figuring out the systems in VnV before I can determine which dice will fit those systems. I want to design every system in the game so that each piece works even if I change the dice rolling system part way through, so today we will be laying some ground rules to help with that.

What’s in a Roll?

Before we talk too much about the reasons for skipping out on a dice mechanic, I want to take a moment to talk about what a dice mechanic is, and why we might want to use one. Most of you will think this is obvious, but digging into obvious questions can present unique mechanics and solutions. Do we really need dice in this game? What are they for? Dice are random number generators. They are tossed onto a table, and the number that faces up is the number we use. In tabletop RPGs, board games, and gambling dice are used to randomize results. Dice are used in gambling to provide the rush of uncertain victory and to help the casino win big. Dice are used in boardgames that demand risk management from players, so that even the best strategist might sometimes lose to some risky plays and unlucky rolls. This can keep board games fresh because working out a perfect strategy is impossible if a roll of the dice can tip a game one way or another. RPGs employ dice in order to achieve both of those goals, well not the casino one, and also to create uncertainty in actions. Uncertainty is important in an RPG because the players are also the audience. The people playing the characters, and this includes the GM, want to be surprised by the events as they come. Otherwise, where is the drama?

So we want to have dice rolling in this game in order to allow for uncertainty and drama, and also for fairness. The reason we are going to spend all this time making rules and systems is because at the end of the day we are making a game, and games need to be fair in order to be fun. Now, fair does not mean equal. If I am playing DnD, the Barbarian will be able to lift more weight than the Bard. Some mechanics need to be different, and that means that some mechanics will be unbalanced, but that is okay. Fair means that there are rules that all of the participants in the game must follow. Soccer has rules, video games have rules, and tabletop RPGs have rules. Rules in RPGs are often even more important because one of the players is in prime position to abuse her power: the GM. The GM is the adjudicator of the RPG, which means she has the power to make or break the game, and while she technically has the power to supersede the rules in most tabletop games, we want to design a game robust enough that she does not have to ignore our rules. Breaking rules in a game is tricky. The GM can very easily harm the trust between her and her players if she decides to do something that violates the rules. Those rules are there so that every player understands the working of the world. If that changes suddenly, all bets are off and the players will not be able to make intelligent decisions in the game world. Moreover, the players will not be able to trust that their decisions are being respected by their GM.

The die roll is how the players will understand their odds of success on actions, and also how they will see that their successes and failures are a product of both their decisions, and some randomness. Randomness is easy. The players can see the dice on the table. The numbers that come up when rolled are close enough to random, so that part is taken care of. Being able to see their odds is trickier depending on the system. D100 percentile systems are easy to understand, because they can be expressed as percentages. D20 rolls are a bit more complicated, but the player can tell that they are rolling a skill that they are good or bad at, and plan accordingly from those numbers. Players will also be able to track bonuses that they receive for certain actions, so that will allow them to strategize within the game world. We want dice rolling in the game not only to enforce fair play between the GM and the other players, but also to create a sense of danger and risk that the players can understand.

Variables in Game Design

When programming a video game, one of the most important tools to make use of is the variable. Variables can be used to assign a value to a word. The programmer has a part of the code where they decide what the variable is, and then they can use that variable in the code instead of a number or string of text. For example, if I want to give my player 100 hit points in a game, I can make a variable called “hp” that I set equal to 100. Now, whenever my code needs to look at my player’s hit points, I can type “hp” instead of 100. This is useful if I change my mind later. If, after much testing, I decide the player should have 90 hit points, I can simply go back to the place where I told “hp” to equal 100, and change that to 90. Done. If I typed out 100 manually every time, I would have to change every instance of the 100 to 90, and that is a lot of work.

Now, I am not a computer. I cannot create a set of mechanics with a variable and then simply replace that variable to change all the numbers Moreover, I am talking about the basic logic by which this game will function. I have tossed around the idea of a d20 system, a d100, d10, d6 dice pool, d10 dice pool, a system where dice directly correspond to stats and skills, and on and on. Each of these systems would represent a massive change to the game. So, I cannot simply design the game with the dice system as a variable, so why don’t I pick one now? The reason is that I plan to design the next handful of mechanics in a general state. I want to define what I want each mechanic to feel like, and then I can start assigning actual dice and numbers to them. If I know parrying should be an action that players can take, and that they should succeed roughly 70% of the time, I can set any dice system to get close to that value. This is as close to variables as I can get in the design of such core mechanics. I can create a framework and then plug mechanics in manually later. So that is the plan for the next couple of articles. I am going to design the mechanics of this game with no dice, and then return and apply dice to them.

You may be asking if it would be easier to design the dice mechanic first, and then the other mechanics. After all, that would allow me to design each mechanic in one pass instead of two. You would be right, but that returns to the problem of changing my mind. See, I started this project with a dice mechanic in mind. I wanted the characters to have three action dice each, and for the Valkyrie to have two plus another one for each Einherjar in the party. Players could commit dice to actions and reactions on their turn. The Valkyrie could, at any time, pass any number of her extra dice to a player. So, you might say, I need a dice pool system for this game. Well, not so fast. One of the issues I had with this system is that it mirrored a problem we had when designing Psychout. When we designed Psychout, I wanted actions to be more fluid than the standard turn based structure. So, we gave each player three actions per turn. These actions were represented by tokens. When the player took an action, they had to discard one token. I thought this would cause players to hold some tokens in reserve for defensive moves, but instead the optimal strategy turned out to be spending all of your action tokens on a single overwhelming attack. The best defense is a good offense after all, and being able to fire off three attacks on a turn was usually enough to take down most enemies in the game. We struggled with the system for a while, before abandoning it for a more standard structure, and the game was better for it.

The other issue we noticed with Psychout’s early action economy was that the tokens ended up being kind of boring. See, I expected that players would see the tokens and come up with interesting strategies about balancing their offense with defense. The problem was that the tokens did not translate well into that strategy. It did not feel like a mechanic where a character could sacrifice defensive ability for some extra damage or accuracy. It felt confusing, out of character, and slowed down player turns as each player tried to figure out if they should drop one, two, or three actions right away. Plus, it felt like a mini game stapled on top of the real game. Players were not deciding between diving for cover and shooting at an enemy: they were deciding between one, two, or three tokens, totally divorced from the fiction. This was a system that sounded cool in my head, but ended up being not very fun when implemented.

What is this Article For?

So, what is this article for? The next few articles will be spent detailing the specifics of each of the major mechanics of the game, but in this article, I want to lay some ground rules for what I want my dice rolls to be able to do. This might seem like a strange thing to do: make a bunch of rules about how I will go about making rules, but it is essential to making a cohesive gameplay experience. See, I can hem and haw about my action resolution mechanics all day long, but I will never be able to decide on a system without a coherent set of goals. As much as internet arguments would have you believe otherwise, every dice system has something going for it. Some people may not like a certain type of dice system overall, but if that system is the best for the goals I want to achieve, I will still want to use it. So I am not worried if a system is “good”. Instead I am worried if the system works for my goals. I cannot decide which system to use based on mythical objective quality. I need a set of guidelines to judge the system by.

The Valkyrie and Passing Dice

The Valkyrie must be able to pass dice to players in order to empower their rolls. I have played with the idea of the Valkyrie passing power tokens or something like that, but no. Dice are more elegant, easier to understand, and goddammit this is the mechanic that started this whole project, and I want to get it working. So, the dice mechanic has to be able to accommodate extra dice in a roll. And, I will add another piece to that, the extra dice have to empower the character’s roll, not just allow for a re-roll or extra chance. Getting spirit power from a Valkyrie should be a big deal. It should allow characters to perform superhuman feats, so whatever way we pass dice, it needs to actually make rolls better, and allow characters to perform actions they had no chance of succeeding before.

Binary Success and Failure… On Most Rolls

Look, I have not had the best time with dice systems that make liberal use of degrees of success. Degrees of success are best used to add complications to rolls, and I find this does not pay off enough depth for the complexity it adds. Edge of the Empire’s dice system is a great example of this. Not only can every roll lead to complex results, but as the stakes and skills involved in a roll increase in value, the likelyhood of unexpected results increases. Seriously, check out EotE if you every want to look at an elegantly designed system for creating chaos and Star Wars style movie magic in a game. Despite it being great at creating chaotic results, EotE is sloooooow. Sometimes, I just want my players to be able to roll a check to convince an NPC of something, or to spot a hidden foe, or balance across a rafter. I don’t need checks like that to produce a laundry list of secondary effects that only serve to bog us down in deciding what each and every extraneous symbol means. I respect that on simple rolls like that, I can just hand wave those symbols away with a simple added effect, but then why bother with the system on every roll if we acknowledge that it is cumbersome on most rolls?

The other issue I have, is that the system robs the GM of the power to determine the consequences of the players’ actions. If my PCs threaten and cajole a local ruler into giving them something, I would probably have the ruler try to get back at them later in the game. In EotE, I could do that, but what if my players roll a Triumph, and no Disadvantages? Is it unfair of me to make the ruler have it out for the players? What if they roll a Despair? That would make the ruler having it out for the players make sense, but do I need to have a Despair on the table for that result to be fair? What if I don’t want the ruler to have it out for the players, but they do roll a Despair? Then I have to figure out some other consequence, one that might not even be related to the actions the players just took. The game book certainly doesn’t offer any insight into those questions, and it slowed me down at the table every time. In DnD or Savage Worlds or Dogs in the Vineyard, the GM doesn’t have to worry about any of that. She can decide that the players have pissed off the local ruler and enact those consequences. Done.

Now, Savage Worlds is a game with degrees of success, but they have limited use. If a player rolls 4 more than the target number, he gets a success with a Raise. This acts as a critical hit on attacks, and can give him something extra on other rolls. Continued Raises mean nothing on most rolls. Only damage rolls allow for continued Raising. This limits the effects of Raises to rolls where the drama of a super high roll matters. DnD is a binary system on almost every roll. There is, however, one notable exception: the attack and damage rolls. Attack rolls have critical hits, and critical fumbles, and as much as players like to scream about natural 20s on skill checks, only the attack roll has that mechanic. Damage rolls are a separate roll made after the attack roll that determine how well the player hit his enemy. That mechanic is nowhere else in DnD. Every other roll is determined by a single d20 check. Why do DnD and Savage Worlds use graded checks in combat, you ask? Because combat is the primary focus of these two games.

I am not sure that I will use graded checks for combat in VnV, but I want to be able to distinguish a system or two with degrees of success if need be, so I will primarily focus on binary success and failure, but allow the chance to make more complex rolls if need be. Simple rolls just don’t need a bunch of added effects. We can give the GM guidance on how to create consequences for player actions. The dice just need to tell us if the players succeeded or failed most of the time.

Only One Dice Mechanic

Almost every tabletop game does this, with a couple of exceptions. DnD uses the d20 for every roll, only having a damage roll that is different. I guess DnD also technically has a different roll for determining starting attributes, but as that is a totally different system that is only used in character creation, I can let it slide. I want to see if I can avoid a secondary dice rolling mechanic like damage. I will probably have some variants of my core mechanic, but every check should be made with the same kind of dice.

The Dice Should Encourage Diversity of Strategy

This is not a DnD style game. While I may still use character classes, I expect that these characters will be more well rounded than a standard DnD hero. This means that the dice system cannot overly reward specialization. This does not mean characters will all be the same. I want characters to be able to specialize in weapon types, professions, magical runes etc. I don’t want that to mean that these characters cannot do anything outside of their wheelhouse. For example, have you ever tried punching someone in a high level DnD 3.5 campaign? It doesn’t go great unless you are playing a Monk. Every character is specialized to use specific weapon types, most of which are not punching, and every character is expected to be loaded down with so many magical weapons that their opponents will be able to easily shrug off a non magical, untrained fist. This is not entirely the d20’s fault, but its style of constant upwards progression means that non-specialized strategies fall off at high levels because the bonus numbers can get so big as characters increase in power.

The d20 system is not the only culprit of this. Some dice pool systems can have a weird arc where the deeper a character gets into a skill, the greater the result of putting more points into that skill. I would go so far as to say I would like to see the opposite of that arc: where putting points into a skill early on leads to rapid growth that tapers off as the character continues to specialize. That is a softer goal, but either way, I want to make sure that my vikings can throw a punch and expect to do something with it even if it is not their primary skill. Come on, they are vikings. If every campaign in this system doesn’t have at least one long house drunken brawl in it, I will have done something wrong.

There Must Be Enough Dice for Magic

I know I have not explained the magic system yet, and I promise I will once it crystallizes a bit more in my mind. For now, know that magic is performed by using the dice the Valkyrie passes to the other players. Each player will have a chart of runes that they can place the dice on in order to activate them and create spells. This means the Valkyrie will need to be able to pass out a decent amount of dice, or that magic dice need to persist even when the Valkyrie restores her own dice, however that will work. I would say the Valkyrie probably needs to be able to give three dice to a character for magic. Whether she will have anything left over to give to the other players is something I can work out later. Let’s say for now that, whatever dice system I go for, I want players to be able to place at least three dice on their rune charts to create a spell.

What I haven’t Included

You may have noticed that I have left out some goals that seem important. I haven’t said how fast I want the dice system to be, or how many dice I want the players to roll. Well, both of those questions can be answered the same way: the minimum amount for the maximum depth. Every tabletop RPG worth its salt strives to have the simplest, quickest dice resolution possible. That key word, possible, is what will determine how long it takes to read a roll in this system. I can’t sit here and say a roll should take no longer than 30 seconds without putting some rules to the test at the table. What if the rolls themselves are an interesting exchange of choices, or what if the roll takes longer but provides build depth that would not be possible without that time? So yes, I want my rolls to be simple, not take too long, and not take too many dice, but “too long” and “too many” will be determined by a combination of seeing the game in action, and gut feeling. I will make my rolls take as long as they need to to achieve the feel I am going for, and no longer. If I feel the rolls still take too long, it will be time to reassess the level of complexity I need for the depth I want to achieve. Basically, the dice system being fast is not really a goal in and of itself because I cannot measure it. I can see if the dice system encourages multiple strategies, or if it can be used to pass dice from Valkyrie to Einherjar, but I cannot pick an arbitrary dice roll time and hold the system to it. It wouldn’t be healthy for the game’s development. So, I am going to use these other goals, and make the simplest dice system that meets all of them.

That’s It?

That’s it! This article is just here to lay a foundation for my dice mechanic. I have a set of rules I need to follow, and now I have a document detailing each rule. Next time, I am going to dive right into combat and break down my design to see if I can’t get us the best dang combat system we can have without a dice mechanic.

#making a game #vikings and valkyries #vnv #dungeons and dragons #tabletop rpg #tabletop roleplaying #game design #savage worlds #rpg #article

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componentplanet · 4 years

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Microsoft Lays Out a Player-Centric Vision of Gaming’s Future

Microsoft’s Phil Spencer released a blog post today discussing what Microsoft sees as the future of gaming and how it will deliver that future to its customers. According to the company, “Our vision has one hero at the heart of it all: You.” (Emphasis original).

Companies love making claims like this in lieu of actually doing anything to improve their products or services, but I’m not sure that’s the case here. Spencer leads by emphasizing that hate speech and abusive behavior have no home on Xbox. Any player who has been harassed or mistreated should contact the Xbox safety team. There’s also reference to new tools for blocking toxicity, with the implication that these are being developed for the Xbox Series X.

Microsoft’s next guarantee? Inclusivity, with more diverse storytelling representing more cultures and individuals. I have never understood why some gamers saw this idea as a threat. More people making games means more stories and different stories. It means titles that tap mythologies and worldviews that are different from the ones we’re familiar with, and that’s by no means a bad thing. Of course, this depends on Microsoft actually carrying out its promise.

Turning attention to the more technical side of things, Spencer pledges that all Xbox games will look and play best on Xbox Series X, including all titles from previous consoles supported by emulation. All Xbox Studios titles will also launch same-day on Xbox Game Pass, including Halo, Forza, Age of Empires, Gears of War, Minecraft, Hellblade, The Outer Worlds, Psychonauts, Microsoft Flight Simulator, State of Decay, Wasteland, Minecraft Dungeons, and Sea of Thieves.

Finally, Microsoft notes that it will continue to release titles for the Xbox One and the Xbox One X. All titles developed by Xbox Game Studios will be supported on older platforms for at least “a couple of years.” It’s not unusual for games launched near a console’s debut to get multiple releases for different platforms, but it’s usually obvious pretty quickly that the game wasn’t built for them. It’ll be interesting to see if the quality of last-gen releases improves, or if Xbox Game Studios do a better job of optimizing for old platforms than other developers tend to do.

The Forward Compatibility Guarantee

This is honestly a rather nifty feature that brings the Xbox Series X closer to matching what PCs can do. If you buy a PC game for a system that’s a little underpowered for the title, you can drop your graphics detail settings to compensate. Consoles don’t typically offer much in the way of adjustable settings, but thanks to Microsoft’s new Smart Delivery system, there’s an effective forward-compatibility guarantee. If you buy a game that supports Smart Delivery to play on the Xbox One, when you upgrade to an Xbox Series X, you’ll be able to download the same title in an optimized format for your new system, with higher graphics fidelity, enhanced effects, and higher resolutions.

Granted, it’s not clear how many games outside of Xbox Game Studios titles will actually use this feature, but we have a small list of titles confirmed to deploy this way, including Assassin’s Creed Valhalla Cyberpunk 2077, and Marvel’s Avengers. Games that support Xbox Play Anywhere — and there are 77 titles on the list — can be played on either your Xbox or your PC.

Microsoft is also combining Xbox Game Pass and Project xCloud. Spencer writes:

With cloud gaming in Game Pass Ultimate, you will be able to play over 100 Xbox Game Pass titles on your phone or tablet. And because Xbox Live connects across devices, you can play along with the nearly 100 million Xbox Live players around the world. So when Halo Infinite launches, you and your friends can play together and immerse yourselves in the Halo universe as Master Chief—anywhere you go and across devices.

The reason all of this is interesting, at least in my opinion, is that it’s a stark contrast to how badly Microsoft blew the Xbone unveil. Then, the company stonewalled questions on features and capabilities. By refusing to answer questions, Microsoft invited enthusiasts to reach the worst possible conclusions. It took the company months to change course, and when it finally did, it threw the baby out with the bathwater, killing off features people wanted rather than simply pushing back their introductions or reworking them to work with the new (old) gaming distribution model.

Though there have been a few missteps involving gameplay demos and showcases, Microsoft has done much better on the whole. There’s a clear sense of what this Xbox Next will offer and what the benefits are: Robust backward compatibility across all previous Xbox products, cloud gaming, and a great deal of flexibility around ideas like sharing games across platforms or devices.

There is, however, one exception to the above guaranteed to hurt the feelings of at least six people: The Xbox Series X will not support Kinect or Kinect games. If you still use one, you’ll need to retain an Xbox One to use it with.

Now Read:

Microsoft Details How the Xbox Series X Achieves Its Storage Performance

Microsoft Pushes Publishers to Offer Next-Gen Game Upgrades for Free

Leak Suggests Second, Weaker Xbox Series X Console

from ExtremeTechExtremeTech https://www.extremetech.com/gaming/312868-microsoft-lays-out-a-player-centric-vision-of-gamings-future from Blogger http://componentplanet.blogspot.com/2020/07/microsoft-lays-out-player-centric.html

#Microsoft Lays Out a Player-Centric Vision of Gaming’s Future

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krisggordon · 5 years

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The Improved Content Optimizer & Keyword Tool. More Features. Smarter. Simply Better

We’re proud to share with you what we’ve been working on lately: A brand new improved version of (probably) the best tool in the content optimization field: The Content Optimizer and Keyword Tool. The tool that is perfectly adapted to the digital marketing realities and designed to help you improve what matters most: rankings.

Here, at cognitiveSEO, we like to get things done. We start improving our features and tools soon after we launch them, we constantly fine-tune what’s already implemented and we never settle for less. That’s how we’ve become addicted to constant and never-ending self-improvement.

Improvement and continuous development sound fantastic, right? But so does waking up early, eating healthy or reading 2 books per month. But until you actually take the first step to do those things – wake up and don’t put your alarm on snooze, choose the salad over the french fries, read the first pages – the gap between knowing what you should do and actually doing it only gets wider.

In case you don’t know about the Content Optimizer & Keyword Tool, you can check out the description below. For those of you who are already familiar with the tool, you can skip right to the improvements.

What Is the Content Optimizer & Keyword Tool?

A More Suitable Name for the Improved Content Optimization Tool

New Metrics for a Better Understanding of Google Search Results

Content & Links Difficulty – Find Out What You Need to Rank to the Top

What Is the Content Difficulty Score?

What Is the Link Difficulty Score?

Keyword Search Volume & Popularity Over Time

Content Assistant Gets Multiple Features

Search Intent – Get to Know What the User Wants from the Very Beginning

Mobile & Specific Local Analysis Are Now Available

Improved Overall Algorithm & Better User Experience

1. What Is the Content Optimizer & Keyword Tool?

Briefly, cognitiveSEO’s Content Optimizer & Keyword Tool is, for the moment, the fastest way to boost your Google rankings.

For those of you who haven’t tried cognitiveSEO’s Content Tool yet (the official name of the tool is Content Optimizer & Keyword Tool but most people refer to it as the content tool), please allow us to say a few words about what the tool does.

We created a tool that will help you take full advantage of content as a Google ranking factor. A tool like no other, a tool that understands how the keyword research and search optimization game needs to be played these days. A tool that makes no compromise in terms of quality. A tool that delivers higher rankings & increased organic traffic.

Below you can see an explanatory video on what our Content Optimize Tool is all about.

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This tool is for any marketer, webmaster, SEO Pro, blogger or content writer who needs an app that will actually yield results on a short and long term; a tool that is fully transparent and understands how the SEO landscape has evolved in the last years.

This is NOT just another keyword tool or a Google Keyword Planner alternative. While all the other tools (that we are aware of) stop at giving you keyword suggestions, we go that extra mile: we let you know what to do with those keywords by giving you the exact methodology one should follow to improve their ranks.

You can find here everything you need to know about the tool. Yet, I’d like to present you just two unique features that the tool has:

1. The Content Assistant – the personalized content optimization & content analysis tool that will give you the exact recommendation you should use so that your content will rank the highest.

We analyze the top ranking pages in Google for the specific keyword you are interested in and, based on a complex semantic algorithm, we let you know how to optimize your content. And which are the exact keywords your content should contain to be as relevant and as optimized as possible.

The tool tells me the exact keywords I should use in my content, highlights the ones I already use and lets me know if there are keywords that I should use more often. In the event of keyword stuffing, the tool will let me know what are the words I overused and which prevent my content from performing as it should.

2. The Content Performance Score – The metric that shows you how well a page is optimized from a content point of view, on a scale from 0 to 100. The higher the score, the better optimized and relevant content it is.

The Content Performance metric is an indicator developed entirely by us, everything from soup to nuts. A lot of Google reverse engineering was involved in this, combining algorithms, ranking signals, content statistics, and concepts such as semantic search, LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing), TF*IDF or topical authority, just to mention a few.

After a keyword research, you get a content performance score for every piece of content you might be interested in, for any keyword or topic.

After we developed the Content Performance Score, we wanted to make sure that there is a connection between Content Performance and Rankings. And, without lingering for too long, we started a massive SERP research on 30,000 keywords trying to identify whether and how content performance influences Google’s top rankings.

The higher the score on content performance, the more likely a page is to be ranked higher up.

You can check out the full research here.

2. A More Suitable Name for the Improved Content Optimization Tool

When it came to our Keyword Tool & Content Assistant, I’m sure you’ve said it and heard it in different ways: the content optimization tool from cognitiveSEO, the content assistant tool or the keyword tool from cognitiveSEO. We don’t mind calling it in different ways; yet, we thought a lot about re-naming the tool so it will be more representative for its main functionality: content optimization.

cognitiveSEO’s Keyword Tool & Content Assistant now becomes the Content Optimizer & Keyword Tool.

The same search optimization tool, the same efficiency, now with a slightly different name. We started with the name change as a prologue. Yet, for the advanced improvements and the brand new features, keep on reading.

3. New Metrics for a Better Understanding of Google Search Results

Being in the SEO business for a while, we know that digital marketers & SEO Pros need and love metrics. They like to compare sites and keywords to find the best cost-efficient solution, to create reports for clients, to perform in-depth researches and so on. And to perform all these activities they need metrics and numbers they can rely on. Their intuition when it comes to try ranking for a keyword for instance, needs to be backed-up by reliable metrics. And they couldn’t be more right. You cannot start an in-depth analysis without relying on a handful of strong metrics.

But what metrics should you actually look after?

Take baseball. Every team has the same definition of success: winning the World Series. This requires one main asset: a good team which is made out of good players. But what makes a player good? Baseball experts used to answer this question with a handful of simple metrics like batting average and runs batted in. Yet, statisticians came up with better, new metrics. They provided teams with the ability to slice their data in new ways, find better ways of defining good players, and thus win more games (I hope you all watched Moneyball).

While we know that all metrics are proxies for what ultimately matters, we know that some metrics are better than others.

You’re most likely familiar with the metric: keyword difficulty. It is a metric used to determine how difficult it is to rank for a keyword. Assessing keyword difficulty can help you determine whether or not it’s worth investing resources to rank on that specific keyword. While we know how important this metric is, we are also aware of the fact that sometimes, this metric alone might not be very practical. We don’t claim to have reinvented the SEO and digital marketing metrics; but what we changed is how we look at the data.

We made the keyword difficulty metric more granular by dividing it within two more straightforward and easier to understand metrics: the content difficulty and the link difficulty.

4. Content & Links Difficulty – Find Out What You Need to Rank to the Top

What does it take to rank #1 on Google? How many times did you hear that phrase and how many times did you answer with “it depends“?

What we tried to do is to eliminate that “depends” as much as possible and to give you the exact metrics you should follow when it comes to ranking to the very top.

In variable proportions, the two most important Google Ranking Factors are content and links. And this is how we came up with two metrics: Content & Links Difficulty.

4.1 What Is the Content Difficulty Score?

The Content Difficulty metric estimates how hard it will be to rank with well optimized content in the top 10 organic results for a given keyword in a given location.

The Content Difficulty is plotted on a scale from 0 to 100. The lower the Content Difficulty score, the easier it is to create content that ranks high. A lower Content Difficulty score means that there is less content competition on this keyword, and a higher chance to improve rankings using content.

And if you are still wondering if content does influence rankings, here’s a quote from Google’s representative, John Mueller.

“Without well-optimized content, even if you clean up your website, and you fix all of the issues, it still won’t rank high.” John Mueller Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google

Not only will the tool let you know how easy or difficult it is to rank on a specific keyword from a content point of view, but it will also let you know what content performance score you’d need to win top rankings for that keyword.

4.2 What Is the Link Difficulty Score?

Links Difficulty estimates how hard it will be to rank in the top 10 organic results for a given keyword in a given location, based on the number & strength of the backlinks that are currently linking to the top URLs ranking for this keyword.

The Links Difficulty is plotted on a scale from 0 to 100. The lower the Links Difficulty score, the easier it is to rank high with backlinks. A lower Links Difficulty score means that there is less competition on this keyword, and a higher chance to improve rankings by getting the recommended number of links.

There is no doubt that the Link Difficulty score is super useful when analyzing the search engine ranking pages or when working on your link building campaign. You want to rank high on a specific keyword, but you need to know what it takes in terms of content and links. And the tool tells you exactly this. But what is even cooler is that the tool gives you the full list of links for any analyzed page.

Simply click on the number of links for each page or each domain, and you’ll be redirected to the Site Explorer where you’ll get a quick and useful backlink analysis. If you want to check your internal links as well, check our onpage SEO tool.

5. Keyword Search Volume & Popularity Over Time – How to Find What the Searchers Are Looking For

The Content Optimizer already gave you info on the number of monthly searches for each analyzed keyword. What we’ve added extra now is the trend of the search query, the popularity of the analyzed keywords.

You’ll now get:

The Monthly Search Volume – the total number of searches that are performed through Google, on a monthly basis;

The Historical Search Trend – the popularity of a keyword in Google Search; It shows the relative interest and trending searches for any given keyword from as early as 2004.

If by now you are still wondering why is this data important, please allow me to offer you an example.

As you can see in the screenshots below, there are two keywords analyzed: “digital marketing agency chicago” and “marketing agencies in chicago il”. It happens (quite often unfortunately) for people to start optimizing for different keywords without making a trend or search analysis before. Indeed, in these two cases, the search volume is not very big, yet, consistent enough. Not to mention the trend. “digital marketing agency chicago” is not only searched more on Google within a month, but it also seems to have a growing popularity. On the other hand, “marketing agencies in chicago il” has a lower number of monthly searches but also a descending popularity trend. If you’re a marketing agency from Chicago, Illinois it would be good to rank well on both keywords; yet, it would be wiser to focus on the one with more searches and a growing trend popularity.

6. Content Assistant Gets Multiple Features

Leaving modesty aside, you need to know that the Content Assistant tool is one of a kind in the digital marketing field.

The Content Assistant is now even easier to use, it’s super smart and does most of the job for you.

What you already knew about the tool is that to optimize your content, you just copy-paste a piece of content, start writing a new one or import the content of a page from a URL and the tool tells you the exact keywords you should use in your content, highlights the ones you already use and lets you know if there are keywords that you should use more often. In the event of keyword stuffing, the tool will let you know what are the words you overused and which prevented your content from performing as it should.

Aside all that, allow us to highlight some of the main improvements:

Get the exact questions people are asking on Google, related to your query – you can see what your readers and customers are interested in, and you can answer those questions in your content. This section is also very useful for identifying new content ideas you can write about.

Better content editing features – whether you copy-paste a piece of text, you import a URL or start from scratch, it will be easier for you to edit the content within the tool.

HTML toolbar included – you can edit and format your content just the way you want. You can view your content’s source and you can edit the code behind it directly or you insert pictures, videos, highlight, format or anything you need in terms of content editing.

See the content performance score you should have to rank in top Google results – you will get a content performance score target based on the analysis of the pages that are ranking for the keyword you are optimizing for.

Know your content reading time – you can now see how long it will take your readers to go through the article written by you.

7. Search Intent – Get to Know What the User Wants from the Very Beginning

Putting it simply, search intent is the why behind a search experience. In other words, why did the person make this search? What was the reason behind it? Do they want to find out something? Do they want to buy something? Do they want to navigate on a specific website?

Knowing the intent of the user is of paramount importance. If the keywords you want to rank for have clear and consistent intent behind them, you can tailor your content format and structure to be the best possible match for that intent.

Let’s say, for instance, that your search is related to sunglasses. Based on the exact words you use, the search engine might interpret your query as having different intents behind it:

informational (if you search for “how to clean polarized sunglasses”);

navigational (if you search for the name of a particular brand of sunglasses);

transactional (if you search for “buy polarized sunglasses” or “sunglasses on sales”);

But sometimes, figuring out the intent of the user is not that easy. That’s why we fine-tuned our SEO content optimizer tool so you can see from the very beginning what is the search intent for the keyword you want to optimize for. This way, you’ll know exactly what type of content to create for it.

A search for “how to make tiramisu” will be classified by the tool as being “informational” from a search intent point of view. To rank on this keyword, it’s likely you’re going to need a “how to” type of SEO content or an user guide to draw attention and, given the context, a blog is probably the best type of page to host this content. On the other hand, with a search like “iphone 10 vs samsung galaxy 10”, you would fully expect for the first page of results to be filled with comparative review type pages from specialized review websites.

8. Mobile & Specific Local Analysis Are Now Available

An online presence is highly valuable for every business, no matter if you are located in a single place or have lots of offices around the globe. And search engine optimization should be applied both locally and globally.

Businesses that want to optimize for mobile and local SEO should have all the necessary tools and knowledge to fulfill their goal. Now more than ever, Google is focused on offering a personalized experience for each user, thus local optimization plays a crucial part in the play. Understanding this, we now offer you the possibility of creating the perfectly optimized piece of content at a mobile and local level. Choose the exact location you want to rank on, and see what it takes to rank be in top Google results.

9. Improved Overall Algorithm & Better User Experience

You already know it: today, publishing content is more important than ever. It is the one thing that is going to make the difference in a really hectic noisy market place.

But content marketing doesn’t happen overnight, especially with its continuous reinvention and advancement of technology. You need the right tools to keep up.

And although the monthly search volume for your query, keyword suggestions filtered by relevancy, number of words, etc. are important metrics for you to follow, they are not enough.

Do you know how the content of your website actually impacts your search engines’ rankings? Or do you know the exact key elements your content needs to have in order to rank in Google’s top results?

Wouldn’t it be great if there was a tool that would tell you the exact things your content is missing to rank in top 10 results?

Good news, we’ve invented that tool and we’ve also improved it: Content Assistant – the personalized content optimization tool that will give you the exact recommendation you should use so that your content will rank the highest.

What was a trendy and efficient technique a couple of months ago, now it might not work anymore as Google have changed their algorithm. This is why we know that in order to have a tool that brings real result we need to keep on improving it. The digital marketing evolves, but so does our tool.

We’ve updated the complex algorithms that make the Content Optimizer work efficiently .

The content performance score is now even more accurate and the keywords suggestions offered by the tool are clutter-free.

Any algorithm has a false positive ratio. Yet, we try to keep that ratio at the lowest possible level. The improved version of the content assistant will offer you zero (or as close to zero as possible) unrelated keyword suggestions or keywords you should focus on. You will now be able to concentrate only on the keywords that will make your relevant content rank in top search result or even in Google’s answer box.

Keep in mind that the Content Optimizer is a learning machine, based on real-time search results. It is not just a database, but an instant Google SERP analyzer. A lot of Google reverse engineering was involved in this, combining advanced algorithms and concepts such as semantic search, LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing), TF*IDF or topical authority, just to mention a few.

We hope you’ll enjoy the improvements just as much as we do. If you’re already using the tool, please let us know what you think about the new additions. If you’re new, take the tool for a spin and tell us how you like it.

The post The Improved Content Optimizer & Keyword Tool. More Features. Smarter. Simply Better appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

from Marketing https://cognitiveseo.com/blog/22980/keyword-tool-content-optimizer/ via http://www.rssmix.com/

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philipfloyd · 5 years