#we had to submit a prototype but it looks like other groups already have finalized levels

[rrogueamendiares]

Our game looks like the worst for now lmao im gonna kms

[blackfemmecharacterdependency]

32. God Bless the Child

Previous || Word Count 7132

The next year was eventful for a tremendous amount of reasons.

First and foremost, Grace had a World Tour scheduled for the end of spring, entire summer, and beginning of fall. That meant that Hazel had the chance to travel, stuck with staff most of the time, or her mom the OTHER portion of time. She didn’t want to do that. Hazel liked seeing new things and traveling, even being around crowds of people, but she was going through puberty and often just wanted to chill with her friends or even by herself, to write poetry, maybe record some of her raps, and work on comics. Of course, Grace told her that if she could do that anywhere, it was in the tour bus.

Simon’s final book was going to be released in the summer, and he was going to begin working on the movie production for the (hopefully first and not only) film in the fall. Whether or not the studio would want to make more would depend on the success of this film, and the budget would be determined by what types of sales this last book made.

Grace was always going on about “an ecosystem,” a concept that one of her favorite influencers spoke about. Basically, she believed that whenever you had the chance to give people that you knew of/believed in a shot, you should do that. So, Simon wanted to get the studio in business with the tech company that he currently worked for, for numerous aspects of the production.

Simon already had multiple prototypes for animatronics and pointed plans for various aspects of this movie. A deal like that could really help the company (that he may or may not be staying at once he finished with this huge movie project), which also might be a situation in which he could be working on many of these things and get paid from his company as well, in the meantime for the work that fell under the studio’s umbrella. It would help all of them, and save money and trouble in other areas where he might have problems with CGI concerns and such.

Simon had been preparing for if Esmoroth took off big his entire life. He still had models at home, and years worth of world building, sketches, schematics, simulations, mini movies, files of programming for how various scenes looked in his mind.

These things being considered, whenever Simon put his and Grace’s schedules side by side at the beginning of the year to find opportunities and plan special events… well… They were not matching up very well. “I don’t like this Grace. I know that sometimes we take a few days apart, but our longest stint has been 2 weeks and 4 days… This calendar makes it look like we might see each other in increments of 6-8 weeks at a time, more than once and the fragments in between are…” He started breathing hard and she wrapped her arms around him from behind. He placed his hands over hers. “Okay. You’re right. We can do this.” She just smiled. She hadn’t said that, but that was basically what she wanted to convey. “Montanus’ arrival is scheduled for the 4th of July weekend.”

“Yeah. I’ll be flying out there. Are you coming?”

“Can’t. But, I’ll be there for the christening… which… you have a show the night before, so… Are you going to be there?”

“I’m planning on it. My show the night before is a few hours away, so I should be able to make it the next morning and still dash out to the next venue.”

“Sweet. Then, I’ll catch the show that night.”

“My period is that weekend.”

“Ugh. I mean… not that I don’t still love you then…”

“We both know why you’re here,” she said, chuckling.

“Because I can’t function outside of your divinity,” he replied, quicker than she was prepared for. He made note of all the spaces that he would have to possibly see her on this tour and started looking into the accommodations that he would need whenever he did.

.

Grace had hit after hit after hit on her album, her old original stuff was starting to receive a resurgence of streams and her pages were getting more traffic than her current team was able to handle some days. But, she simply reached out, within her ecosystem for others that might be able to join said team and make things flow better. Meanwhile, she didn’t get onto social media much. One of her problems with fully letting down her walls was the fact that surfing the Internet always made her have to take a look at how people viewed her. She had to start considering that no matter how well she did or how hard she tried, someone out there would have a problem with her, and because she was famous, it would be a lot of someones.

Hazel was online more with her work. She liked to enter freestyle challenges, submit her spoken word, publish her poems. She called her current brand of creativity “Doetry,” and she had a pretty increasingly large following. Simon usually helped to administrate, because Grace was never great at that type of thing and also because he didn’t trust Internet weirdos enough to not be involved.

She was going through things, but he never censored her or intruded. He monitored to make sure that nobody was making her life any harder than it had to be, being raised in NYC and the daughter of a very public figure, and also Simon, who was important enough, depending on who you asked… and he was getting to the point where he might reach notable fame.

May 19 was a Tuesday that year, so they would be spending the previous weekend celebrating Hazel’s birthday and her actual birthday would just be a school day that everyone on social media sent her birthday wishes on. Simon took time off to take Hazel, Lucy, Lindsay, Alex, Todd, and Louis to Grace for the weekend. The way that the schedule was set up, she wouldn’t have had the time to leave and come back and go to her next venue, but they would have the time to come to her. Hazel suggested that she just miss out, but Grace was NOT going to do that, especially with the year that Hazel had been having. So, she paid for Hazel’s friends to come with.

Simon found it fascinating that these kids’ parents were entrusting the children to him to get on a plane together, travel to another state, spend more than one night there, and fly them back home safely.

He supposed it was similar to a Scouts trip, or a school trip… but he was just the “parent” of another child. He wasn’t a scout leader or teacher. Then again, those were just people too, he guessed. He would NOT feel comfortable sending Hazel on a plane with any of these children’s parents, except for maybe Lucy’s.

But, Simon found that his old scouts instincts kicked in when being responsible for a group of kids, but this time around he had that nagging dad-like behavior that the past couple of years around Hazel had given him.

Being off for Hazel’s birthday, she arranged for them to have a spa day retreat. The kids and some of the staff were included in this, though not as advanced a day as Grace and Hazel. Whenever they met up and had their indulgences, Simon could barely keep his hands off of Grace. Hazel felt a little bit slighted.. It was HER birthday, after all. They didn’t have to be cozied up the whole time. Of course, Grace presumed she wanted to spend most of her time with her friends, and whenever they finished with cake and began listening to music and chilling, Grace and Simon left them with the Nanny so that they could have some alone time. Hazel aired her grievances to her friends. She hated that Grace was on tour. She hated that their home life was separated into different worlds that she had to board and unboard. Lindsay understood it perfectly. Her dad was sometimes not home for weeks or months. Sometimes, she didn’t see her mom (who actually lived with her) for days. Sometimes, whenever she did see her, the woman was busy with making appearances and performing shows, and she DIDN’T have a nanny. She just had to be at home by herself a lot. Whenever her dad was there, he’d have his friends over a lot. They would disrupt Lindsey’s quiet, but she would be grateful that she wasn’t alone. She would LOVE if her parents tried to include her in their worlds like Grace and Simon did with Hazel.

Lucy’s parents were usually there whenever she needed them, but they didn’t seem to be very happy. They were always together, but the only time that she saw them smile at each other or talk to each other was whenever they were out in public. Her father was a politician, and her mother was a public figure, simply for being his wife and being a good conservative wife who followed his guidelines. Lucy… didn’t care for any of it. She would’ve liked to just have two people who love each other like Grace and Simon seemed to.  

Hazel felt a little better, because apparently, she had pretty good parents. She also didn’t feel a little better, because she still felt dissatisfied.

Whenever Simon and Grace made it back, after the others were asleep, Hazel talked to Simon about letting her stay home with him after the school year ended. Both Grace and him loved her, right? So, she should be able to stay home, near her friends, in her comfort zone, and then she’d see Grace when she got home, and she’d be crazy excited about it, like she used to be when she didn’t get to see her everyday. Like she was whenever she saw her this weekend!

Simon reluctantly let her know he would be much busier in the summer than he was at the moment. He was at home with her and the Nanny as much as possible, but he reminded her that there was less than a month left of school and then she would be with her mom again. Her mom had ONLY been gone now for about a month… Hazel didn’t know if he could hear himself basically saying, “It’s only a couple of months away from your mom, both of you changing over that time in different ways and potentially growing apart, then you get to be awkwardly thrown back together because I’m not actually your parent and can’t wait until she can take you back!” He didn’t say that, but that was what she heard. She nodded her head, sadly, and Grace chimed in to remind her that she’d be on tour with her! They hadn’t been able to be together in almost a month and after one more, they would! Hazel smiled. “Of course, Grace. I can’t wait. We’re gonna have a lot of fun.”

Hazel finished off the school year with the Nanny and Simon. They flew out to meet with Grace, in June, spent a couple of days together, then Simon was headed back home, to focus on his stupid important things, Hazel couldn’t help but think. And she was pissed at him, too. She had been mopey and basically on autopilot most of this time, even with Grace trying desperately to cheer her up whenever she had some free time.

She just wanted a summer where she could hang out and have fun if she wanted to. Grace asked her to at least give her a couple of weeks to prove that this could be a fun experience. However, Grace kept running into that troublesome hassle of the public being pushy and entitled. Hazel and she kept either getting rushed in and out of places and trapped for a while, bothered every few minutes when they weren’t holed up, or surrounded by staff getting things done in between performances. Hazel lasted two weeks, then cried and begged to go home and be able to see her friends. It broke Grace’s heart but she promised to let Hazel go back with Simon after the stop in California for her baby brother’s birth.

Grace felt super rejected and cried about it, but if that was what Hazel really wanted, she didn’t want her career to make her feel stressed out. Her mother was quite a smartass about it. “Who would have thought that it might be difficult to focus on a demanding career while raising a child?”

“I didn’t call you for this.”

“Of course not. What did you call for?”

She wanted to know how the surrogate was. Grace didn’t know what it said about someone that they would rent out their body to grant someone else a child, but she could totally understand the flipside. Whenever Simon mentioned babies, she was extremely willing to adopt again, even the smallest baby that they would be able to be matched with… but nothing statistically made her have an inkling of wanting to actually change her entire body, probably for the worse so that she could potentially die to bring someone else into the world that she would immediately begin having to take care of and put everything into. It was hard enough to do with Hazel, and getting harder all of the time.

When that child’s period came around in February, Grace picked her up from school, gathered up the products she was most interested in (products from Grace’s own line), provided snacks, emergency meds, just in case, and any information that Hazel wasn’t certain about. Simon came over with a gift basket of stuff that had been suggested to him by browsing nice things to do for periods. They really wanted her to be comfortable and safe. She just wanted them to stay the fuck out of her room and let her lay down and write poems.

She didn’t get how Grace had period yoga, and heightened self care. The LAST thing Hazel felt like doing was caring about anything, even self. She wanted to rest and to rage. That was it. Grace would buy her flowers and say something silly like, “Whenever my period comes around, sometimes, flowers make me feel happier,” Then just… leave a pot with an orchid, or geraniums, or a peace lily in her room… to have to what? Care for a flower now TOO, as well as self?? Hazel hated the way her period made her feel. She spoke to her therapist about it and was advised to speak to her mother and potentially a gynecologist about it as well. Hazel put that conversation off, though.

She seemed her happiest whenever she was able to go to her grandparents’ to wait for the baby with them. Grace… didn’t understand…

Simon explained, “You don’t remember being 12 and not wanting to be around our parents?”

“Our parents sucked though! And she WANTS to be around my parents!”

“She wants to meet her baby uncle,” Simon told her and wrapped himself around her.

“Has she mentioned anything to you? I know that sometimes she feels more comfortable telling you stuff than she does me, since you aren’t her parent…”

He let go and frowned, “Wow.”

“I mean… There’s paperwork, Simon. You aren’t…”

“I know, but, I step in as much as you did before that, maybe even more. I understand that she technically isn’t mine, but she's important to me, too, Grace.”

“I know, but…” she sighed and shook her head, “I’m not trying to start a fight. Of course you’re as present as any father has ever been for her. I wasn’t trying to downgrade that, and I didn’t mean to sound like I was. I just wanted to know if she’d said anything to you about me.”

“No. She’s not talking to me. But, she does express herself via Doetry.”

“Her content is so angry and dark…”

“What she shares, at least…” Grace threw him a warning look. “I’m not saying make it a habit, but maybe taking a peek into her personal stuff might give you some type of clue as to what she needs right now.”

"I'm not snooping into Hazel's things, Simon. There's a reason that she shares what she shares and hides whatever she hides, IF she's hiding anything. I don't want to parent that way."

"Okay."

"And I'm also saying that you shouldn't."

"Noted."

"Okay… what I meant by shouldn't is don't do it."

"So, it's an order?"

"Yes."

He sighed. Hazel WAS Grace's daughter, legally, and he didn't want to do anything that he didn't have permission to. "Okay." It took him longer to say it than Grace had gotten accustomed to, but she knew he meant it and that it was hard for him to agree to this wish. She strummed his cheek with her thumb and he leaned into it and smirked. It was also easy to make him forget whenever she upset him. She leaned up just enough to kiss him on the nose and he blushed. She giggled. “What?”

“The fact that you’ll blush when I kiss you on the nose when you literally have been putting your nose right in between my thighs for almost 2 years.”

He blushed even more and shrugged his shoulders, “I’m blushing then, too. You just don’t notice because you’re usually quivering in pleasure.”

Sha gasped, “Cocky,” she said and elbowed him playfully.

“Confident… and accurate.”

“You don’t have to SAY it,” she said, now blushing herself.

He didn’t call her on it. Just seeing it was enough. Simon kissed her on the forehead and whispered, “I love you…” Her smile vanished and he furrowed his eyebrows, staring at her mouth in disappointment. “Sorry. I thought…”

“No… Don’t be. I guess it had to come up some time…” She stared at her hands. “I don’t know how to… I feel like my actions should… I know sometimes people just need to hear it, I just…”

“Please, stop.” He laughed, but was red and she had a feeling not from blushing. “You’re making it worse.”

“I just… Had an immediate flashback to the first time you told me and… I don’t know. This was so different, and you’re so different, and I have no idea why my brain is doing this to us…”

He wanted to say because of what he did to her, but hell.. That was really long ago and like she said, everything was different now. One day, she HAD to forgive him! He shrugged his shoulders, “You can’t control how you feel any more than I could.”

She frowned and nodded. Then, fortunately, Hazel came rushing in, "He's coming!" Simon and Grace both rushed into the birthing quarters where Mrs. Monroe, the documentation crew, the surrogate, midwife and such were. Hazel and Simon stood out of the way while Grace rushed to the surrogate and asked the midwife what she should do. (She was designated as her birthing partner, as she felt bad that her parents didn't seem to see her as anything more than a vessel) Grace spent a lot of time reading up to try to prepare for this.

It was a powerful time. It LOOKED as painful as it sounded from everything she read that discouraged her, but she tried to be strong for the surrogate. Simon was really impressed with how much Grace was able to do for her. He knew that she had become very empathetic over the years, but it was honestly a side of her he still hadn't seen. Meanwhile, Mrs. Monroe looked on, excitedly, but useless.

Whenever Montanus was born, Grace and the surrogate were both crying and Grace complimented her and told her how she was stronger than (Grace) could ever hope to be. When Grace tried to show her the baby, Mrs. Monroe cut her off and collected him, then gave the nurses some instructions for seeing to her. She was about to have delivery day photos taken.

"None with Astrid, Mom?" Grace wondered, still holding the woman's hand.

"You can, if you insist," she said. "Bad enough your father is late. I don't want to hold everyone up."

Grace was going to say more, but the surrogate squeezed and tugged her hand to get her attention and shook her head. "I signed up for this," she said, quietly. "It's not like he's mine…"

"You held him. You changed. You grew. You hurt. You bled. You cried. You.."

"Signed up for that." But she looked sad. Ao sad that Grace decided at that moment of she EVER DID have a surrogate, it was going to be a fellowship. A sisterhood. A loving connection in which she repaid the person with respect as well as her fee. She was a human. How her mother was able to just plant Montanus inside of her and basically discard her afterwards made Grace feel sick. She didn't even go with Simon and Hazel to see the baby. She was more concerned about this woman who had to put on a strong face after a really hard job.

Later, when she had to leave and also send Hazel off with Simon, she cried on him. "I'm not gonna do that to my surrogate. It was really mean, right? That was so cold…"

Simon rubbed her back, "Grace… it's a business transaction."

"He's not a transaction! He's my brother and he JUST got here, and Mom's ALREADY treating him like an asset. She messed up one kid and she’s had two decades to learn better emotional intelligence. The restart doesn’t look good to me.."

"She's bad at the emotional stuff, but she's trying," Simon offered. You aren't like her and you'll never have to be. You can treat your surrogate as sweetly as you please. But...I have to agree with your mom that they didn't need to connect. That'd just make it harder.

"She couldn't even say hi to him? After all of that?"

"It's what they agreed to. She would have taken one look at him and tried to keep him."

"She wouldn't be able to. He's from my parents' DNA. It was just… so uncomfortably cold. You should bring a baby into a warm life. I was too upset to even see him. I didn't want to give him the negative energy I had."

Hazel shrugged, "You didn't miss anything he looks like… a potato."

Simon gave her a shove and she wondered what was wrong with the truth. "He hasn't developed his looks yet. But he was cute in that it's a new life way."

"I… did not see that," Hazel admitted.

"You saw a potato," Simon repeated.

"Yep."

.

The christening was closer to the end of Grace's tour. She was going to be seeing her parents, new brother, Simon, and Hazel all again for the first time since she'd been on the road alone. Hazel and Simon went early so that he could help his dad with some things and Hazel would stay with her grandparents while he was doing that. Grace arrived in the morning and headed straight to the church.

They were supposed to wear neutral colors and earth tones, meanwhile, Montanus was styled to be in brilliant white with silver and gems. Grace had flashbacks to seeing photos of her own day. She had been draped in gold and yellow and dressed in something that was probably more expensive than reserving the building. She had been "clothed as the sun," and now nearly 25 years later, they had a boy "clothed as the moon."

Her mother told her that she has her outfit selected. She has to change in a room that brides generally used and Grace was a little thicker than when she had initially been fitted, so she squeezed into it and was far more voluptuous than she wanted to be in a church. Non-believer as she was, it simply seemed distasteful. She loved her halo crown for the event. It was pretty fancy, as she seemed to be reprising her role as the sun.

The officiant said something about the sun giving light to the moon, just as she, as his sister and godmother would give her own form of light to him and other poetic and sweet things about love and support, God and stuff and he blessed the baby and allowed them to put him on display for another photoshoot.

Grace ducked out, because she was STARVING, so of course Simon and Hazel came with, as they hadn’t had a chance to spend time with her in weeks. Old stomping grounds made them feel nostalgic and gave Hazel more fodder for imagining them as kids. She loved those times. Them, her age or a little bit younger or little bit older - she wished she knew them then. She wished for adventures like theirs with HER friends. She would never let it turn out how they were for a while, but she was also glad that they had each other now. The past few weeks with her and Simon had been very challenging, as he was more strict in Grace’s absence than when she was home, but he wasn’t abusing it. He just didn’t have Grace there to override him putting his foot down. Hazel hated THAT, but he didn’t care about certain other things, like she got to hang out with her friends longer, stay out later, and stay up later. Grace was a little more about her keeping a certain structure, which was fine a few years ago, but now it was unnecessary to Hazel and fortunately, Simon didn’t care because it was summer. So long as she was upfront about what she was doing and checked in, he was pretty chill. BUT, if she went outside of the boundaries, he was VERY strict. Almost like he felt betrayed. She hated to make him feel that way. They worked out well, though. At the end of the day, they were always friends again.

Grace noted that they had a few inside jokes and stuff while they were at lunch. People kept looking at the trio, in their fancy dress at this little burger dive. A few people came to see if they could get autographs and stuff. Grace was pretty open to that, even when it was uncomfortable. Simon reflexively wanted to step in, but she would brush it off and give him a look to ask him not to, so he gathered his sense of territory and possessiveness and choked it down. He didn’t have consent to defend…

Then… Something else happened. They were getting ready to get into the car and someone rushed up on them for an autograph. Simon would have been impressed with his quick reflexes if it didn’t go so… terribly infuriating…

He stopped the person in their tracks and they threw their hands up, and said that they just wanted a photo with Grace. Simon let go of the guy’s collar and looked at Grace. Hazel had her hand over her heart. Apparently Simon wasn’t the only one caught off guard by the Flashlike fan. “You okay, Haze?” he asked.

She was breathing hard and staring at the man. Grace stooped down to get on her level. “She’s fine,” the man said. “Could I get a photo?” Grace took a deep breath, ignoring him and repeated her question to Hazel. She wasn’t sure why her baby girl was reacting so intensely. Sure, it could be that this motherfucker came out of nowhere, but also… she could have known him from before, because they were in the same area they used to live, OR she might have had something recently happen that made this spook her today. WHATEVER the case, Grace was concerned and trying to talk to her. “I’ll just get a photo and leave you to it.”

“Chill,” Simon warned. He was getting pissed at this person and also worried about Hazel, because she still hadn’t responded. The guy scoffed and Simon clenched his fist. Realign your patience, Simon. Realign.

“Haze?” Grace repeated. Hazel took a deep breath and nodded.

“Sorry. He scared me. I’m fine.”

“Told you she was fine,” the dude said, really annoyed. Simon bit his lip and was practically digging holes into his palms with the balls that were his fists.

Grace wrapped an arm around Hazel and politely told the man, “I’m not currently taking photos. We just stopped to eat and we have to get back to something.” She was now too upset to take a photo. This was her boundary.

She opened the car door for Hazel and the man said, “Ugh, you were signing stuff inside, I saw you.”

Simon stepped in front of him and reiterated, “Yeah, but she told you no, so I advise you to step away from Grace and her daughter. You’ve already startled her and were extremely insensitive about it. You didn’t even apologize to her.”

“She said she was fine, just like I said.”

“She also is clearly not fine, and you, as a grown man should have been keen to it and respectful of that, especially considering that YOU were the one asking for something!” Simon’s canines were bared and Grace had to admit… she was not against seeing this Simon emerge again… not in this situation, at least.

“That’s not even her real daughter…” CRACK! Hazel called Simon’s name. He didn’t hear her. He had taken that balled up fist that he had been tempering and connected it to that man’s jaw. Grace held Hazel back and said softly, “Maybe cover your eyes, Baby.” Because she wasn’t gonna interfere. Simon looked at the man after he had punched him onto the pavement and some people had gathered. Then, he remembered! He turned towards Grace and Hazel, worried that he had just royally screwed up. Hazel’s face was alight with amusement and Grace’s alight with… something else.

“It just snapped…” He explained.

“It’s okay. We all mess up, right MOM?” Hazel asked, smiling at Simon.

“Yeah, Haze, but he didn’t mess up. Sometimes, people deserve it.” She took Simon’s swinging hand in hers as the ex-fan rushed off crying and complaining about pressing charges. “Let’s get back to my folks so I can tend to this.” She kissed his hand and smiled at him. He smiled back, swelling with pride. Hazel took his other hand and kissed it. These two hand kisses were very separate and different things. But, both mattered to him more than anything in the world.

“I lost my patience, but i don’t feel bad. Nobody’s gonna hurt either of you, as long as I’m there. You ARE Grace’s REAL daughter.”

“I know that, Simon. I’m yours too,” she said with the casual shrug of her shoulders, but he knew that it was a huge thing for Hazel to say such a thing.

.

Simon got to hold the and he was extremely enchanted. "Grace! He's so beautiful. Oh my God. He looks just like YOU!"

Mrs. Monroe offered, "Or, he looks like ME? Grace got her beautiful genetics from me."

"Yes, Mrs. Monroe. You look like Grace, too," he said, not turning away from the baby in his arms. She frowned and folded her arms. "Grace, if we have a baby, I hope they look just like Monty!"

"His name isn't Monty," Mrs. Monroe said. "It's Montanus. It means mountainous. He's the highest point of my life."

"Wow, Mom. Screw me then, huh?" Grace joked. This kid really WAS precious.

Mrs. Monroe said, "You put me through months of HELL, and quite frankly depression and misery. But… after a very long and painful journey pity of my body, we looked at each other and I felt like seeing your face delivered me from all of the worst of all of that. I'd been given grace, and I told your father after he snuck that hideous photo of me gawking at you that would be your name. We were going to call you Soleil. Like the Sun. But, I met you and I said, No. This is my Grace." Mrs. Monroe cupped Grace's chin and Grace smiled while Simon's eyes watered.

"That's a beautiful story." He nuzzled Grace with his nose and whispered, "I can't wait until we have a beautiful birth story."

"You certainly CAN wait," Mrs. Monroe said and eyed him up and down.

"So, you put Grace in THAT dress and let me look at THIS baby and you think I'm NOT going to think about knocking her up?"

"He's joking. We don't even do that,"Grace said.

"Doesn't mean I'm joking. LOOK at him, Grace. This has got to be the most beautiful baby that has ever lived!"

Grace scoffed, "Um. No. I'm sure that was me as a baby."

"I don't know… I can't imagine any baby ever looking more adorable than this one." He shook his head and looked at him, then pulled him close to hold against himself.

He heard Mrs. Monroe whisper, "I think he thinks he's ready for one." He shut his eyes to listen to the infant breathe. He… hadn't held a baby since he had been helped in holding Hope when he was a little boy. He'd had a similar reaction to her… but he didn't know what she looked like anymore and he didn't even have feelings for her anymore. He remembered her as someone who was lost way too soon, someone that he accidentally hurt, someone who would remind him to always handle the innocent with extra care. "I would kill for you," he whispered and kissed Montanus'" head. For his own. For Hazel. For Grace.

Grace wondered, "Can I hold him?" The way that he was feeling about this baby… He didn’t want to let him go… but then again, Grace was still not wanting kids and Simon rationalized that holding “Monty” was gonna change that for her, so he reluctantly handed him over in the hopes that she might be swayed. “Wow…” She said staring into big brown eyes, like her own but more bright and full of wonder. He reached out for her and she let him hold her finger. “Okay. I absolutely want one,” she joked. Simon smiled. He knew the feeling, even though he also knew that SHE didn’t really mean it. She did have a point, they still hadn’t actually had sex. They had… done a lot. Very gradually over the past year and a half, but not that and she seemed to get anxious whenever things approached it. Simon always stopped and confirmed whether or not she wanted to do more. That out that he gave her, she always took it. It was why he kept checking. He worried that if he didn’t, she might just go along with things, and that could be something else to resent him for down the line. Affirmative consent. It was a small price to pay to keep the amount of trust that HAD been rebuilt intact, and maybe someday it would pay off.

Someday was closer than he’d thought. They eventually surrendered that baby back to his parents and Hazel, not wanting to cry jealousy, but feeling a way retired to her room to meditate and write before bed.

Simon and Grace retired to her room, afterwards. “I am lovesick with baby fever,” Grace said. He was on her like prey, with his hands sliding up her sides and his nose tracing her neck. “Slow down, Gray Eyes,” she said with a chuckle, looking at them in the vanity mirror. How many times had they looked at themselves in that mirror when they were younger? It was never like this… They didn’t even look the same to her. They didn’t feel the same, but somehow, everything was all coming back to her, just being in here, with him.

The good and the bad. Luckily, she would be able to say goodbye early in the morning and not see him for a couple of weeks. Tonight could just be… fun. She tried to push out the old thoughts, the old fights, the old Grace and Simon. They were Simon and Grace before The Apex and they had become another Grace and Simon.  New and improved.

“This dress really isn’t helping in the “slow down” department.”

“I’ve gained a little weight,” she said, a little self consciously.

“Mmm hmm,” he said, appraisingly, tracing but not touching the curves of her cleavage. She hadn’t given him permission. Simon was very disciplined, now. Very diligent in not crossing any boundaries, but he certainly danced the fine line.

“Will you please help me out of this dress?” She whispered, not taking her eyes off of the obediently trained blond man in her mirror.

“Yes, ma’am.” He carefully unclasped the back and slowly unzipped, revealing each inch of her skin with utmost reverence and full throttle desire, contained, but entirely visible as she studied his face. She stepped out of the dress and carefully placed it aside. He noted that specifically, because he remembered how she used to just toss them on the floor. He was making more and more notes of how much more thoughtful she was about her things and surroundings. “Grace?”

“Yes, Simon?” she was cleaning off her makeup, still in her undergarments and halo crown.

“I just wanted to thank you for letting me back in. I know that it takes a very big person to be able to do that and I’m grateful that you’re so big of a person and I’m also proud of you. You’ve changed a lot in a lot of ways that I tried to stop before, because I was scared that you’d outgrow me and leave me behind if you came to be this bigger person. I’m glad that I’ve realized that becoming a better you was exactly what type of person who could give me another chance. It makes me want to be a bigger, better person. It makes it easy for me to be good, and I’ve realized that I do it for you, but also for myself. I feel better, and I just want you to know that you’ve done so much towards that.”

She wanted to make a joke about how he must’ve really wanted some tonight to be spilling all of this, but he was so genuine, she was entirely too touched. Between that and his protecting Hazel earlier, not to mention Hazel claiming him?

She set her cloth down, turned around and kissed him. No other response was needed.

The kissing grew, she didn’t break apart while they carefully made their way to the bed and… well… it wasn’t really a discussion or a question. The time had come. Simon opened his mouth to confirm that she was sure and she silenced him with her lips while she took off his clothes.

At every point that he wanted to ask her for permission, she took initiative while simultaneously kissing him to stop the question. If she thought too hard about it, if he asked her about it, she would think too hard about it - If she thought too hard about it, it might never happen.

At some point, she began crying. Simon panicked. He tried to pull out, but she clasped him tightly with her legs and held on to him, sobbing into his ear. Were they happy tears, or had he made a mistake? It was fucking with him. “Grace?” he whispered, slowing down, at least. She urged her hips to make him speed back up and he started crying too. “I don’t know if I’m doing something wrong!” he whimpered, terrified of her tears right now.

“Does… it mean something to you, Simon?” She asked in an insecure voice that he hadn’t heard in so long that he forgot how she sounded when she wasn’t sure of herself.

He lifted his head to look her in the eyes, moving her chin to face him so that she couldn’t avoid it.

“Everything. It means everything to me, Grace. You mean everything to me.”

She sobbed and began to move her hips again, somehow holding on even tighter to him. “Never let me go again. Never push me away.”

“I promise. I won’t. I swear on my life.”

She’d mentioned before that her period was that weekend, but she wasn’t on it. The stress of touring probably knocked her off of her schedule. At any rate, she wasn’t one it, as she had planned to be. That worked out perfectly for Simon that night, but he wasn’t even thinking about those details at the moment. He had to spend the rest of the night making sure that she knew things wouldn’t be like they had been before.

A couple of weeks later when she came home from the tour, Hazel and Simon had her welcome home party under way. It was lowkey - just the 3 of them and the cat. Simon cooked everyone’s faves, and they didn’t ask tour questions. Hazel kept using “Mom” and “Dad,” despite the official paperwork. Grace felt super at ease, considering.

“Hey… We have to talk about something, as a family…” Hazel and Simon looked at each other, both a little worried, as she sounded super serious out of nowhere. Did something happen to her on the tour? Were they about to have to kick somebody’s ass? What was she about to say?? “I have an announcement…” She took a deep breath and took something that she had on her person out.

Simon gasped and got up to rush over. Hazel asked, “What is that?? What’s the announcement??”

Simon took both of Grace’s hands and searched her face, “What do you want to do? You know I’ll support anything. If you aren’t ready, I understand…”

“UNDERSTAND WHAT?? WHAT IS THAT, MOM???”

“I’m ready,” Grace told Simon, then to Hazel, “Mom’s… having a kid…” She winced, unsure of how Hazel was going to feel about a bio on the horizon. She SCREAMED. “OMG! Lindsay and Lucy are gonna be JEALOUS. SO JEALOUS! Lindsay thinks her kinkajou is SOOOO cool… and it is, but I’m gonna have a SIBLING! Oh… unless we’re being quiet?”

“For a while. I’m still… taking it all in…” Grace said. She looked at Simon. She was scared shitless.

“I’m going to do whatever you need.”

“I know. I trust you with my life.” He smiled brighter than anything she had ever seen. She collected Hazel and him, “Both of you.”

Next

[biondinoya]

Godzilla KotM - Final Review (Plot & stuff, Spoiler Alert!)

Now that I've watched the movies 5 times in different theaters, I think it's time for me to give a proper and final review for my long-awaited favorite movie, Godzilla: King of the Monsters. As a monster and dragon fanatic, it's difficult to find a movie that can satisfy my appetite nowadays. It is why I've waited for this movie for so long.

We had a bunch of superhero movies already, we need more monster movies! (or at least that's what I felt as a monsters-fan).

I made a review before, but it deals more with the monsters. You can check it here.

 Now let's begin with the movie plot. Spoiler alert, so beware!

The Plot

Monarch managed to create a device named ORCA. It's a device that could emit frequency to communicate to the Titans (kaiju term on this movie). After successfully using it to calm down larva Mothra, the device is stolen by a group of eco-terrorist to wake Ghidorah in Antarctica. Monarch sees Godzilla threatened by something and they decide to follow him. They fly with their mothership named Argo to Antarctica. The eco-terrorist with the help of Dr. Emma Russel wakes Ghidorah up. Godzilla approach Ghidorah and they engage in a fight. After knocking Godzilla down. Godzilla wakes up but Ghidorah manages to fly away.

The Monarch then flies to Isle De Mara. On their way to Mexico, Emma explains to Monarch that this is the only way to restore the balance of planet Earth. Then she awakens Rodan who is slumbering in a volcano. Rodan's roar turns to call both Godzilla & Ghidorah. The Monarch then successfully lured Rodan to follow them. They bring Rodan to Ghidorah who flies in the middle of a thunderstorm. Ghidorah knocked Rodan out. Ghidorah turns to Monarch, but Godzilla ambushes him. They both fight underwater and Godzilla is taking advantage, he even decapitated one of Ghidorah's head. Unfortunately, the US Navy is launching a new prototype weapon named Oxygen Destroyer. The missile hit both Godzilla and Ghidorah. Ghidorah survived the blast and flew away, while Godzilla is heavily damaged and seemingly get killed. Ghidorah regrows his head and awakens other Titans. Rodan returns to Ghidorah, submitting himself to obey Ghidorah as an Alpha.

Meanwhile, in another place, Mothra has transformed herself from a cocoon into her butterfly form. She then flies to some ocean where coincidently meets with Monarch. She tries to call for Godzilla, and Godzilla is responding, proving he's not dead. The Monarch then sends a team to help regen Godzilla, who is located undersea. Dr. Serizawa sacrifices himself by manually detonating the nuke, which revives Godzilla and increases his power.

In Boston, Madison is stealing the Orca and broadcasts the device in Fenway Park. The frequency managed to calm down the Titans rampage. Ghidorah comes to Boston to destroy the Orca. Right before he wants to blast Madison, Godzilla fires his atomic breath, throwing Ghidorah and saves Madison.

Godzilla then engaged in the third battle with Ghidorah. In the middle of battle, Mothra arrives to help Godzilla, but she is intercepted by Rodan. Rodan was then stabbed critically by Mothra. The bird is seemingly dead, but the butterfly is heavily damaged, leaving her to stand weak to help Godzilla. Ghidorah overpowers Godzilla, and Mothra sacrifices herself to shield Godzilla from Ghidorah. The destroyed butterfly turns into ashes and rains down to Godzilla, transferring her energy to help Godzilla. Ghidorah then tries to kill Godzilla and absorb his life-force.

Mark, Emma & Madison then lure Ghidorah away with Orca, trying to get Godzilla to heal. Emma drives away with Orca, allowing the Monarch people to escape. Ghidorah follows Emma, and Godzilla is recovered. Godzilla turns into Fire Godzilla (I believe it's Burning Godzilla), he's glowing red and melting everything around him. He blasts some sort of nuclear energy pulse to Ghidorah twice before finally he kills Ghidorah and reverting to a normal state. After that, the Titans arrive and bow down to Godzilla, including Rodan.

Few years after, the eco-terrorist is buying a Ghidorah dead-head in Mexico.

The End

Reference to the Originals

Now based on the plot, I want to point out some that really pay homage to the originals (outside the ‘newspaper ending credit’ because it's too fast to follow).

1. Dr. Serizawa is a character from the original Godzilla 1954. He founded Oxygen Destroyer and sacrificed himself to killed Godzilla with that weapon. He killed Godzilla underseas, wearing a very similar deep-diving suit. Now In this movie, he's the one who believes in Godzilla. He also the one who sacrifices himself to resurrect Godzilla.

2. Ghidorah is a space dragon, true to the original Showa. His most powerful attack that when he eats powerplant, is referring to Grand King Ghidorah from Rebirth of Mothra 3 (1998). He blasts the gravity beam through his mouth and wings. In the original Showa era movies, Godzilla alone can't defeat Ghidorah. It's also presented here. Also when he tried to kill and absorb Godzilla's energy is referring to Kaizer Ghidorah from Godzilla Final Wars (2004).

3. Dr. Illen & Dr. Ling is referring to the original twin-fairies, who have faith in Mothra (1961) and other movies.

4. Godzilla's fire form (or Burning form) is directly taken from Godzilla VS Destoroyah (1995). His pulse blast attack also appears in Godzilla VS King Ghidorah (1991).

5. Mothra's death often occurs in the original movies.

6. The discovery of one of Ghidorah's head is referring to Godzilla VS King Ghidorah (1991). Instead of only one head, the originals had his full body except for the missing middle head.

7. The music theme for Godzilla & Mothra is faithful to the original.

The Cut Flaws

The perfect movie doesn't exist. No matter how good it was, it has flaws. Through 5 times of watching it, here I try to identify where the flaw occurs in the movie in terms of the cuts.

1. The first one is Oxygen Destroyer's blast impact seems not that powerful. I do think it could cause collateral damage to anything around it.

2. The scene when Godzilla is dropped from the sky by Ghidorah. Madison and friends are opening her mouth in awe, while the dust is blowing through them. They should close their mouth when it happens, or at least cough afterward.

3. Godzilla's final energy blast that killed Ghidorah. It looks immensely powerful, so the impact on everything near him should be more devastating than that.

4. I don't think any person is brave enough to face Ghidorah as Emma and Madison did. Emma is chased by a dragon that is bigger than a building, and so with Madison. I think everyone would be passed out in such situation.

5. Ghidorah's gravity beam that attacked Madison in Fenway Park radio tower is weaker than it is supposed to be. That gravity beam should immediately blow the building.

6. Mark is looking at Mothra who flies outside the Navy boat, suddenly he already inside the boat.

7. It's not a flaw but we don't have the cut of Madison's very first trailer "Hello? Is anybody there?".

8. Some people bring up the problem with the logic of how Godzilla can stand in the water when he roars after get resurrected. If only they know Godzilla's other greatly absurd skills, that wouldn't be a problem. :D

The Storytelling

The original Godzilla 1954 movie is dark and depressing. But the rest of the movies take Godzilla in many different directions, and the most well-known of them is the monster's brawl. It has become the tradition of Godzilla movies, while not always. It's known among fans that if you're watching Godzilla movies, it's the monster's brawl that you're looking for. Most of the stories are absurd and not like that blockbuster-Hollywood-style. Most of them but not all.

Godzilla 2014 marks the debut of the first Hollywood movie that stays true to the original Godzilla. The movie is directed by Garreth Edwards. His way of directing the movie is slow-build, revealing the monsters to the audience bit by a bit. It's more like watching a human perspective on Godzilla. I think this way of storytelling works very well for me, although I also agree that there's not enough Godzilla in Godzilla movie even at its climax scenes. However, Gareth's style has made it introduce Godzilla as a very big monster.

Now Godzilla King of the Monsters is directed by Michael Dougherty. Mike is a true fan of Godzilla, I can assure you. He throws more monster scenes in the movie. WITHOUT forgetting to pay respect to Garreth's style of directing since he did it first. I've watched the movie 5 times, and I think he's balancing Garreth's style into what the fans wanted. The fans wanted more monster scenes. I think he did a good job of doing a balance of respecting Garreth's style and fans' demands. For me, you get a good amount of monster scenes still with the human perspective.

I'll make a comparison to MCU Avengers for now, since it's a very popular franchise. Now in some context, Godzilla King of the Monsters felt like Avengers, they have many BIG characters in one movie. However, MCU has the chance of introducing each one of the heroes through each own movie. And it's made in Hollywood (which has a greater chance to be known worldwide).  In terms of Hollywood-made, Godzilla, unfortunately, doesn't have this chance although he spanned 32 movies already from TOHO. Add that to many of his absurd movies, making it even harder to access the general audience. He managed to be made in Hollywood in 1998, but it's not the true Godzilla that the fans hoped for. You don’t get enough introduction to each monster in Hollywood. For the general audience who have less knowledge of Godzilla, this could present a problem.

As for the story writing and plot, I don't find any problem with enjoying this movie despite any cut flaws. If you compared it to other original Godzilla movies, the story of this movie is made more sense and acceptable. Even I saw kids love it and it’s nice! Sure as a fan it would be cool to see if Godzilla does his silly things like dancing or flying kick, but I'm not sure the general audience would approve.

Where to Watch

So here in Indonesia, I watched the movie in 5 different cinemas. 3 standard cinemas, 1 IMAX, and 1 Dolby Atmos Cinema. If you want a superb quality for the image, go for IMAX. But if you want to really feel the roars and explosions, then go for Dolby Atmos. 

I personally found Dolby Atmos is the best experience for watching the movie.

Personal Conclusion

My very first introduction to Godzilla is from his toys and I love him ever since. Then my first experience of his movie is The Invasion of Astro Monster, also the first time I learned his absurdity and silliness. But that doesn’t stop me from being a fan, instead, I dig deeper into his lore and find it fascinating and entertaining. I was a huge monster fan after all.

So in my opinion, Godzilla King of the Monsters is the best Godzilla movie produced in Hollywood ever. It's the movie that I've wanted to watch for so long. It's indeed the ONLY movie that truly I hyped for this year. The music score is amazing, the VFX is amazing. Seriously, the music alone is outstanding. Go check them out on Watertower Music channel on Youtube.

 As a true fan of Godzilla, I'll rate this movie 15/10. But if I put myself as a casual viewer and as objective as I could it would be 8/10. Great Sci-Fi Fantasy movie.

Thank you, Michael Dougherty, Legendary & Warner Bros for making such great movie. I really love it.

Long live the king.~

[nissokurbansho]

Week 13: Reflection - final post

As for my final post for this subject, I would like to go back in time and meditate over some historical past, skills and design movements I have discovered during this semester.If my memory is serving me right, on our first comm design lecture, we were asked as a whole group to submit our personal objectives, and what we could possibly expect from ourselves in this subject. I have already been asked this question in the past. My past answer was to learn the rules, so I could break them later. I was mostly referring to the use of typography here. For this subject specifically, I wanted to work outside my comfort zone, and test myself at times. Try new methods, experiment with new media and dedicate more time for personal progress and development. I have always liked Stefan Sagmeister’s quote: “Having guts always works out for me”. Being able to expand and take risks as a designer initiates growth and success. Another important objective of mine was to learn how to better interact and work synchronously in a group, afterall this subject has the word “communication” in it... I work better separately, and find it to be sometimes overwhelming to work in a group. There can be so many thoughts, ideas, and opinions that may lead to a big confusion and stagnancy in work.

Now looking back, I can certainly say that I have achieved both of my objectives. Although of course my first objective about personal development requires years to achieve, I have definitely progressed and feel better about myself now. I have never worked on a bigger scale before, so experiencing the process of Project 1 was very new to me, as well as working with tape. I became a lot better with planning and discovered zine-making. This was a completely new territory for me. Although I already had a digital experience in setting up the layout and grid, I’ve never produced a proper physical copy. In the past I have often avoided test-printing which is one of the most crucial parts of the making. Which would result in poor font choice/size. This time I was prepared to produce very best possible prototypes of my zine. And finally I have also reached my objective at working better in a group and being more productive.

I really enjoyed the lectures just as much as workshops. Simply because, I have personally discovered historical art, new design movements and refreshed some of my past knowledge. Being in touch with history is extremely important for a designer. There is a massive amount influence following from Constructivism, Modernism, Bauhaus movement, going back to discovering the early- print and Gutenber’s first printing press (although he didn’t necessarily discover it, but combine already existing technologies). I have further expanded my understanding of Bauhaus movement. I am completely fascinated by the restrained design stripped off excess decor. Movement, solely based on practicality and functionality. Marcel Breuer’s furniture especially caught my eye. In terms of concepts and ideas, I have discovered and strengthened couple of fields. It involves critical thinking, because a lot of the activities done in class involved evaluating and commenting on each others work. Being able to provide a helpful insight and constructive criticism is important. Couple of recent lectures touched on inscription technologies and future progression of biometrics. I have discovered a lot of new interesting case studies for myself, like EyeWriter. There were several activities from this course that have inspired me and made me equipped with a refreshed perspective on design. Writing materials and medium don’t always have to be standard like pen and paper. Communication may take place in the most extraordinary ways. As long as we are able to visualise it, we are able to communicate the message. It’s something I haven’t thought about much before. It pushed me test and try more media. There are certainly a plethora of things I would like to explore further. Self-development and self-education is an on-going process, that never stops. I think I would definitely like to understand the principles of publication design, and the grid system. Joseph Muller- Brockmann’s book “Grid Systems” is a great start at understanding the grid use in graphic design.

[sheeping-around]

Sheeping Around Retrospective: By The Numbers

tl;dr: Scroll all the way down for the numbers.

Sheeping Around has been live on the App Store for a little over ten days now. I think it is about time I look back at the development cycle, the good parts, the bad parts and also share some sales figures while I’m at it. I’m following the trend of transparency to help other indie game developers know and understand the market of premium games, for which I gained inspiration from Eric @ Slothwerks and Arnold @ Tiny Touch Tales. I’m also inspired by the way they work: solo devs working with talented people across the world on a contract basis, and I follow the same pattern.

While I’ve worked on games in the past, this is my first official release on the App Store, and I’m really glad to have been able to reach that goal. My previous games got stuck in infinite iteration loops and never got to see the light of the day. 

Inception

I have written in one of my previous posts how the idea of Sheeping Around was born. The idea began as a turn based (asymmetric) strategy game, and eventually turned into a card game that it is today. You can read more about it in the below two posts:

Sheeping Around Inception

Inspired by Card Thief and More

Inspirations of Sheeping Around and its inception as a physical card game

Development

I have around 8 years of experience as a Javascript developer. While I am familiar with other languages like Java and Objective-C/C++, my core expertise and speed of development is still in Javascript. Also, I had begun using TypeScript at work since mid 2017 and had loved it. Reminded me of the good ol’ Flash and Actionscript days.

When the physical version of Sheeping Around card game was proven to be fun enough, I began working on a web-based prototype version of it using Angular.js on the front-end and Node.js on the backend in the first week of November 2017. I deployed the system on Heroku on its free plan, and used Heroku Postgres as database of choice. (It was free upto 9000 rows, more than sufficient for a prototype.)

Initial prototype version of Sheeping Around

For the native mobile version of the game, I used cocos2d-x JS with TypeScript.

I pushed the code to GitHub as private repositories. I maintained separate repos for client and the server.

Multiplayer

Initially I had planned on Sheeping Around to be a solitaire card game, but it ended up being too similar to Card Thief. It wasn’t much fun anyway either. I decided to prototype a two player dueling game on paper, and it proved to be a lot of fun. I figured it would be much more challenging to handle a multiplayer game, but given my full-stack experience, I was confident I’d be able to do it anyway.

Architecture of Sheeping Around

Sketch, GraphicRiver and GUI

Around March 2018, I began working on the GUI of the game. I had recently switched my role to Product Design at my company Sumo Logic and had begun learning Sketch and loved it. I bought some assets off GraphicRiver and heavily modified a lot of them and put them together in Sketch.

All screen designs in Sketch

I wasn’t very happy with the initial designs, but towards the end of April things had started looking much better and professional.

Initial designs

Final designs

Google Indie Games Accelerator

The progress in the initial few months was somewhat slow. I spent time refining the balance of the game and tweaking the progression. Meanwhile I was also designing some UI for the native mobile version of the game.

By the end of June 2018, Google announced the first ever Indie Games Accelerator for games made in South East Asia. The submission deadline was July, so I started rapidly working on the mobile version for Android and iterating it really fast. By mid of July, I had the gameplay fully functional. By the end of it, I had the entire progression system and marketplace fully set up. 

Some charts from the progression and reward system of the game inspired mainly by Pokemon

While I was not selected for the accelerator program, it did help me accelerate the game development process anyway and I am thankful to the accelerator program for that.

Art and Animation

I discuss a lot about art style with Rashi, and we had finalized that the characters would be anthro. Check out some concept art and final artwork for some of the characters below:

I really loved the idea of in-card animations in Card Thief, and wanted to have something similar in my game as well. I was fortunate enough to run into Robinson Millaguin in the Indie Game Developers Facebook group. He began his work on animating some of the initial cards in Spine and my mind was blown already. Check out the video below:

You can see more of the animation GIFs on the official website for Sheeping Around.

Tragicomic Theme and Music

I had contracted someone for music, but it did not sound so fitting. It was very difficult to decide what kind of music would fit this game because it was such a unique premise. I started scouting out for tracks on AudioJungle. Farms are usually associated with country music, but I had ruled it out completely. Western style music with gut guitars and ukuleles are a close second choice associated with farm themes. Somehow that style didn’t fit either, and sounded rather cowboy-ish. 

I explored all kinds of genres of music and tried to see if they fit in the game. Finally, I found that the music in Comedy genre seemed to be the most fitting. I stumbled upon the profile of AudioAgent, who had an amazing portfolio of comedy tracks. His tracks are tragicomic themed, and coincidentally, he kept adding more tracks in the genre as the game progressed.

The game now features a total of 9 comedy audio tracks by AudioAgent. (The tracks change every 10 levels.)

You can check out the tracks in the below Youtube playlists:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1Ajh9Cn23k&list=PLnTakDx63B8L0pBpjPD10VB3NJEcXj2l4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BXeq713R444&list=PLnTakDx63B8IS3hr4Sd-tnZXgu5vCIoi6

Sound

I had already made a list of suitable sounds from AudioJungle, but it was from a variety of artists and didn’t seem to fit together. I was not sure if I should hire a sound designer for the project. I figured it would be a good idea to ask around anyway.

I am active on Twitter in the gamedev community, and I found Elise Kates’ profile there. She had done some amazing work in the past for games like Moss, and I thought she’d be a good candidate to help me out with the sound. And it was a great decision afterall. The sound effects added the finishing touches to the polish in the game and really brought the characters to life!

Putting It All Together

I’m glad I’ve been able to put all of this together in a single package. The pun in the name, gameplay mechanics, art, animation, sound and music all come together really well. It would be perhaps be one of my proudest achievement since it is an important skillset to have.

Translation, Screenshots, Trailer and Preview Videos

In December, I took help from the Indie Game Localization community to get the game translated in 12 languages. It was an overwhelming amount of work, about 5000 words. I maintained separate Google Sheets for each language.

But what was harder was designing screenshots and preview videos and localizing them into all languages. But it did pay off eventually because it got the game featured in most of the regions that I had localized for.

Check out the preview video below:

Robinson helped in creating a landscape trailer for the game as well, since Android needs a landscape video regardless of whether the game is landscape or not. it was more of a theatrical trailer that served as an introduction to the premise of Sheeping Around and dab a little bit into its gameplay:

Freemium, Premium or Paymium?

The hardest decision for me to take was whether to go premium or freemium (or paymium), and if premium, what would be the price point of the game. Early on I had decided that the game would be premium on iOS and free-to-play on Android, given how easy piracy is on Android (more on piracy in the Piracy section below). I had thought of keeping the game’s price to $4.99, as I had read that Card Crawl had recently upped its price to $4.99 from $2.99 and it increased their month-on-month sales by more than 2x. Turns out, it won’t work very well during release when both developer and the game are new to the market and there are no ratings and reviews. This is also why my day 2 sales were more than day 1 sales, when I dropped the price to $2.99.

My game also has in-app purchases, and most people object to the idea of IAPs in a premium game. But if you look at the top paid charts in the card game category (or even any other category for that matter), you will find that more than 70% of the games have IAPs. This model is called paymium on mobile platforms, and has only recently entered the debate alongside freemium and premium. In the PC world, most games are paid, and the concept of DLCs is fairly normal and accepted, so I don’t understand what the issue with IAPs in premium mobile games is about.

Besides, the IAPs in Sheeping Around aren’t your typical in-your-face popups that appear at the end of every game to give you a reward or to increase your life. They are subtle, just two coin packs that you can buy if need be. You probably won’t need to though.

Pre-orders and the Coming Soon Feature

I set the game to be available for preorder on 31st December 2018. That would make my first new years’ resolution to be to release this game. I set Thursday, 17th Jan as the release date. That is because App Store refreshes every Thursday and it would get greater number of days in visibility if it gets featured then. (Most features last at least a week.)

That is also when I also submitted my game and my story to Apple via App Store’s promote link, hoping to get featured.

On January 5, the game got featured in the Coming Soon section, and it started getting a little spike in pre-orders. From 1-2 per day to around 25-30 per day. On January 20, the game got featured in a lot more territories, including US, UK, South Africa, Middle East, Australia and New Zealand. I netted about 250 pre-orders from this feature. But it turns out that in some places, since Apple lets you preorder without having a linked credit card, they would fail to be billed on release of the game. Because of this, only about 200 pre-orders went through successfully. App store still shows -1/-2 net preorders days after the game’s release.

New Games We Love & Top Charts

Upon release, the game was featured in “New Games We Love” in US, China and the Greater China Area (HK, Macau, Taiwan), South-East Asia, India, UK, Europe, Singapore, Australia and New Zealand. It also went on to become #3 card game in US (iPhone) during launch and stayed between #3-#5 during the first week. In China, which is the second biggest market for me, the highest it went was #9 in card games. (Competition is quite high in that category there, with most paid games priced at ¥1 ($0.15).)

I especially love the words UK editorial team used to describe the game in Games We Love.

Reception

The reviews so far have been positive, with occasional negative reviews talking about some bugs, most of which I have fixed in the week after release. Here are the current reviews and ratings stats for the game so far:

US: 4.6 / 5 (56 ratings, 32 reviews) China: 4.3 / 5 (41 ratings, 23 reviews) Thailand: 4.7 / 5 (15 ratings, 11 reviews) Germany: 4.0 / 5 (11 ratings, 6 reviews) Russia: 4.6 / 5 (8 ratings, 7 reviews) UK: 3.7 / 5 (6 ratings, 4 reviews)

Some encouraging reviews:

“I’ve only played this game for 20 minutes, and I love it already. The creativity, the idea, everything about this game is just beyond my expectations, and I can only assume how addicting this game will be.”

“It a really good game. You should make a physical card game for this game. I really like it and it’s definitely worth buying it.”

“Don’t really review apps, let alone end up playing one a day or two after I started. But this one... this one got me hooked! It’s fairly simple gameplay but sometimes it gets pretty exciting.”

“Pre-ordered it, I've played Card Monsters since release & Hearthstone for 4 years & this game is very solid & entertaining.”

“I think this game is another new twist to a card game, I can definitely see potential for this game. I can’t wait for the next update, hopefully with some new cards to use.”

“This game is family oriented and so easy to play. It has the simplicity of UNO yet with enough strategy to keep you engage but not overwhelmed. This is highly addictive and fun to play. The element of luck is always a factor but how to use the cards given is the key. The games are short but competitive. Those who love card/card battle games should download this without hesitation! Kudos! Look forward to updates to see what you guys come up with next!”

DAUs, Screen Time and Retention Rate

I use Tableau for my data visualization needs, and have custom graphs and dashboards created for all kinds of metrics. 27% of the players have played the game for at least one hour, which is quite encouraging. 4.5% of the players have been addicted and have played for more than 5 hours. I’ve been seeing an average DAU of around 750 and average total session time of over 450 hours. Not that it matters much for a premium game, but I’m tracking it anyway. In terms of retention, my day 7 retention is about 10%, which isn’t so bad. I will give it more time to see what my day 30 retention is.

Press Coverage and Critic Reviews

I had mailed a lot of media sites and YouTubers to review the game. A lot of them covered the game. Thanks to the localization effort, the game was featured in a lot of foreign language blogs. 

Specifically Pocket Gamer and Pocket Tactics wrote about the game. The review from Pocket Tactics was negative with a 2.0 / 5 rating, and from Pocket Gamer was somewhat above average at 3.5 / 5 rating. Pocket Tactics review, though negative, gave me a chuckle because of their words of choice.

You can check them out here:

Pocket Gamer: A surprisingly tense, exciting and fun card battler that doesn’t quite have the tactical depth for the long haul.

Pocket Tactics: Sheeping Around looks the part, but sadly the game turns out to be as dull as you would expect for a game based on an animal that stands around in a field all day chewing grass.

The criticism though has been pretty good in these reviews, and I will add more content and depth in the future updates to address the weaknesses they have mentioned.

Piracy

One thing I wanted to point out was that about 25% of the users of Sheeping Around are using a pirated version. I was under the impression that it would be very hard to pirate an iOS game, because it would need jailbreaking and it isn’t very easy to jailbreak your iOS device. Turns out I was very wrong. There are pirated App Stores like AppEven that you can install on your device, and you can install premium iOS games for free using those stores. You don’t need to jailbreak your phone and the whole process is dead simple. Turns out these folks are abusing Enterprise App certificates for ad-hoc app distribution, and Apple hasn’t been paying much attention to them. 

Within about two minutes, I was able to download a pirated version of my own game from AppEven. It even added its own ads that pop up once every few minutes that bring revenue to the owners of the pirated app store. It made me a little sad, but that’s the way it is. No matter how many attempts you make to prevent piracy in your app, the hackers will have a workaround to bypass it. They can remove the code in your app that prevents piracy, replace your ads with their own. It is their daily business.

Promotional Artwork

For games that Apple finds worthy of promotion using a banner feature or on the Today page, Apple requests developers for promotional artwork. I got this request last Monday and I submitted the artwork by Wednesday. The game hasn’t gotten a banner feature or Game of the Day yet, so I can only hope it will happen one day in the future.

By The Numbers

And finally, the moment you’d been waiting for. Sales. Sheeping Around was able to break even about 50% of its outsourcing costs (art, animation and sfx) in 10 days since launch. 

The top 2 territories where the game made some decent revenue are US and China, followed by Germany and UK.

What’s next?

I’m already working on some new cards that add more variety to the gameplay. These include:

Bonus cards

Peek - Look at the opponent’s hand. 

Undo - Undo the opponent’s last move. It can also potentially undo a stolen or whistled sheep.

Lucky Pendant - Draw half the number of cards in your hand (rounded off).

Shepherd cards

Fence N (N = 2, 3, 4) - Build a fence around all sheep preventing any of them from being stolen for N turns.

Electric Fence N (N = 2, 3) - Build an electric fence around all sheep preventing any of them from being lured or stolen for N turns.

Quarantine N (N = 1, 2, 3) - Cure all sheep of Infestation or Intoxication by N turns.

Vaccinate N (N = 3, 4) - Prevent Infestation or Intoxication on all sheep for the next N turns.

Thief cards

Infest N (N = 2, 3, 4) - Infest all sheep with pests to prevent them from being whistled for N turns.

Intoxicate N (N = 2, 3) - Intoxicate sheep to prevent them from being grazed or whistled for N turns.

Thrash N (N = 1, 2, 3) - Damage a Fence or an Electric Fence and reduce its value by N turns.

Termites (N = 3, 4) - Spread termites to prevent building a Fence or an Electric Fence for the next N turns.

Changes to existing cards

Rescue N (N = 1, 2, 3) - Reduce the effect of Trap, Infestation or Intoxication by N turns on one sheep.

Distract N (N = 1, 2, 3) - Reduce the effect of Guard, Fence or Electric Fence by N turns on one sheep.

You can already add an ally that unlocks at Lv. 20 to the game. Future updates may include upto 5 allies in total:

Shepherd’s side

Beaver - Jack Kim (Lv. 10)

Llama - Fuzzy Wumpkins (Lv. 20)

Sheepdog - Casper Cloud (Lv. 30)

Emu - Emily McCoy (Lv. 40)

Donkey - Muriel Miller (Lv. 50)

Thief’s side

Raven - Merlin Kook (Lv. 10)

Eagle - Cradoc McClaw (Lv. 20)

Coyote - Roxy Fang (Lv. 30)

Badger - Agent Chaos (Lv. 40)

Bear - Boris Rockpaw (Lv. 50)

Additional Features I’ll also be working on some features like: - Expressions and dialogs - Offline mode vs AI - Pass and play multiplayer - Quests

Conclusion

Sheeping Around was a fun project, and unlike my other shelved projects, it saw the light of the day, and it is a proud achievement for me in that regard. For the past 14 months, I’ve worked part-time at a consistent pace on this project (and full time for a few months). Especially as a solo developer being able to develop a PvP multiplayer game where people in US can battle people in China with servers located in London, I think it is a great feat.

Look forward to more updates in the future on this blog. Follow the blog on Tumblr or me on Twitter to keep yourself up to date on the progress of the game.

[charleightolley-blog]

Final Major Project

26-01-2019

I began my Final Major Project by struggling to find something I wanted to spend a vast amount of time researching into and creating outcomes for. I began by brain storming issues in society which I was interested in tackling and then narrowed them into a handful of topics which I could tackle realistically and produce powerful outcomes for.

After a conversation with one of my lecturers, Brian, about what I was passionate about in the world, what sparked an interest and what I spent my spare time looking into / watching. I created a brain storm of what I am extremely passionate about and chose one pathway from that.

I spend a lot of my spare time looking into missing people cases as it amazes me that in the 21st century people can still go missing, especially in a city like London where we are completely watched with CCTV. I watch YouTube video’s to understand theories and do my own research into how and why people go missing. It’s a bit of a strange hobby but it’s actually quite popular and growing in popularity on YouTube. So I took this hobby and started researching into a specific area among missing people where I could explore and maybe someone hadn’t already explored.

Then having a group chat with some peers and presenting them with the issues I have faced, helped me narrow down an insight to tackle directly through out my final major project - some people want to be missing (for what ever reason), how can we help the people they have left behind. Rather than force the missing to be found when this is not their wish, help the families have closure to a worrying time.

I started some brief research into the current missing people campaigns and how charities have tackled the issue of missing people / runaways. The emotion I got from these campaigns were extremely sad but also very mechanical. I wanted my campaign to have emotion and feel personal to the people I am targeting.

09–02-2019

I needed to decide how I would be able to help those wishing to stay missing without making them feel as they need to disclose their location. After critically analysing existing campaigns for missing people and discovering that there is not any campaigns which allow the missing person stay missing - all current campaigns feature them coming home or others disclosing their whereabouts. This research helped me greatly as a designer as this will be what I will be researching into and gaining an understanding of what is already targeting the area of which I am trying to 

Most campaigns are online, meaning those with no smart phone / internet do not get to see these campaigns which may be aimed at them. I knew I had to design and make something physical and that could reach those without smart phones and could possibly be living on the streets.

From this, I began researching into techniques pieces of information can be distributed physically.

05-03-2019

I began looking directly into zines and why zines were used. Zines are most commonly used to distribute a message to a vast audience, however on a budget. I believed that using a zine, printing it by hand gave each issue a personal touch rather than polished magazines which have no personality to them. Zines usually look rough, not polished and finalised. Going to Ravensbourne university library, I was able to look at some hand made zines which had been donated to the library for educational purposes. This really helped me gain a better understanding that Google wouldn’t have been able to.

After deciding I was going to be  creating a zine, I began doing depth research into people who have gone missing and are believed to be in London (as London is a popular city people decide to run away to due to its population). When researching into charity pages such as Missing People and YouTube video’s where YouTubers relay the information they have researched, I began making content for the zine. The content consisted of the missing persons photograph, hand written messages from their loved ones and where they were able to send a response home.

After talking to Brian, again, it came to me that maybe it would be very difficult for the missing person to compose a message to their loved ones. Finding it difficult to put into words why they need some space, and then Brian told me about how back in the world wars, families would receive a message from the front line but it would be a pre written message. Rather than the soldiers composing messages themselves.

Taking a leaf from this book, i decided to start looking into possible pre written responses which would be sent to families back home.

As well as doing this, I was designing the layouts for the zines and working out which type of printing would work best.

17-03-2019

After a Riso Printing workshop with Steve Stacey,  I decided that this way of printing would fit perfectly with my zine’s identity. I wanted the zine to feel personal to each person reading it and that the reader felt a connection to the content they were reading. Each print from the Riso printer would be slightly different depending on how the paper went in, how warm the ink was and the papers grooves. I then began changing my designs to fit how the Riso printer needed the images / layers to look.

I had never used such a printer before so it was quite difficult learning how the print outs would work, very trial and error with a lot of my first zines. However, after perseverance, I began to know how the printer worked, how to change the ink colours and what buttons I pressed would effect the final outcome.

Whilst prototyping the zine, I began drawing up some of the interactive screens and how they would navigate through the screen / user journey. Very early on, I knew that the screen had to work in a few taps rather than taking a lot of time out the individuals day. The longer it took to answer, the less chance it is for someone to complete the screen activity. The human races attention span has rapidly decreased - it’s known on social media, if a video is longer that 30 seconds, most turn off the video. And some news articles now have a time of how long it will take you to read it. So keeping this in mind, I made the screen designs easy to follow and only a matter of clicks.

25-03-2019

I began using Adobe Xd to start developing my drawings of the interactive screen. I had not used this software before and gaining an understanding of how it works and how it can help me in the future developed me as a designer. Developing my knowledge of prototyping and how to mock up a screen to understand and map out the users journey.

I realised when creating the interactive screen that it would be handling delicate information and there could be a chance that the person interacting with the screen could want to exit the screen quickly as they had changed their minds with contacting home. This was then back led up with research when looking into the Missing People Charity - on the website, there is a button which says exit quickly. When pressed changed the page url and what is on the screen to a search home (google). I then incorporated the exit quickly button into the screen and who ch pressed, takes you back to the home page and deletes all content/ data.

Developing the users journey through the screen and creating the different ways someone could explore the screen helped me explore the software more and understand how it could be used to present my work to it's full potential.

After watching some YouTube tutorials, I began working Adobe Xd to it’s full and working the mock ups so I was able to drag the screen and scroll down pages which would be used in the real interactive screen. After finishing this mock up, I was able to put the video onto an iPad screen to show viewers how it would really look when in person.

After creating this, I had to do the same with the application on smart phones where families / loved ones could submit their messages for the missing person.

30-02-2019

Sadly, my next door neighbour was reported missing - he had gone missing after a family argument and leaving the house. He was known for suffering of depression and having a rocky relationship with alcohol. Having a person so close to my home chose to go missing and seeing first hand what it does to a family when searching  and needing closure made me more passionate about creating my FMP outcomes better and more relatable to the missing person. Having many conversations with his wife and her sister about him being missing and following their search for him over a week gave me an insight into how families feel about loved ones deciding to go missing.

Fortunately, he made contact with home and was found safe.

02-04-2019

Printing the final zines with the Riso machine was a bit touch and go, still learning how the machine works and how to change the master print. However, it did work eventually and I was able to print out two issues of the zine.

After creating my first issue of the zine, sadly two of the young missing people’s bodies had been found. Liam Smith was a 16-year-old who was last seen on 17the November on a bus. A major search was launched in the Aberdeenshire countryside, but a member of the public discovered a body which has now been confirmed the body was that of the teenager.

And the other being the 21 year old student Libby Squire. Police searching for missing Hull student Libby Squire have confirmed a body recovered from the Humber estuary is in fact the young woman. 

Due to these sad news updates, I decided to design a second issue of the zine.

After finishing the zine prints, I decided that it would be practical to made small business card like cards with the information to where the interactive screens are located with the name of the cause. This would be practical for people to hand to homeless people around London and could be in constant cycle when the zines are not published or circulating.

This project has really helped me improve as a designer by understanding how the research process and prototyping process works in industry. I developed my knowledge in prototyping software and evaluate what was missing in my portfolio and created it. Physical / print outcomes were missing from my portfolio and by creating and finishing this brief, I was able to fill that whole in my professional portfolio.

[hirenpatelbct-blog]

Reflective Journal

Outline of the assignment

In this assignment, you are revisiting your previous blogs and creating a reflective journal blog. Journal should be a reflective document that provides personal and thoughtful analysis of your individual participation/progress and reflection.  You are required to submit a full reflective journal, aggregated collection of entries so that your “final” journal covers the entire semester analysis of your thinking process and articulating what you learned as a creative thinker.  HOWEVER, it is very important that you be honest in your journal entries.

________________________________________________________________

 I used to always think that I was not a creative person and that Ideas that I usually come up with on a daily basis weren’t good enough to become noticeable by others.  When coming into the BCT environment I first noticed that there was no wrong answer if you put your mind to the test, dedicate your time to your craft and passion you can achieve anything. This semester in my first year of BCT I have been studying three core papers which are called Introduction to Creative Technologies, Creative Technologies Studio and Programming for Creativity. In these courses I have been learning how to think outside the box of and become a Creative technologist. I have also been learning how to showcase my ideas on Projects whether that’s by myself or in a group. In the Creative technologies studio, so far I have completed a total of three projects which I am reasonably happy with the final results. The projects that I have done so far this semester have been Cards for Play, Sound and Spaceship Earth 2050. These projects have been very challenging but fun I feel I have gained a lot of important skills and creative ideas which can be useful in the later projects in the next coming years of my degree and hopefully when I go into the workforce.

Introduction to Creative technologies. This where I learned the basics of the Creative technologies. I learned about how to understand creative ideas and way to write blog entries. Blogging personally, I was never really fond of especially using Tumblr. I used to always think that nerds only do blogs and that it wasn’t really wasn’t necessary at all. The assessments in ICT such as videos and blogs has really boosted my self-confidence up. Before being in front of a camera was a mission for me, I would feel very scared but now It’s just a piece of cake. Plus, sharing Videos on YouTube of myself has made me feel more confident in communicating with my peers as trying to showcase my mind towards Creative Technologies and my personality I was no longer the shy kid However It took a lot of time, dedication and effort to collect my ideas and feelings together towards the course to video myself. It was also quite daunting and scary because of the realization that our Videos and Blogs are going to be marked by the lectures. Everyday thinking hoping that they don’t hate my video or my blog, did I explain myself well and Is my Idea up to the standards required. However, as the semester went I began to realize that as Creative Technologists our goal is to become creative and original we should not care of what someone else thinks of our video, blog or any material we have made and I mean yes they are teachers their marking it however we should be proud of the work we produced and if they don’t like it look for ways to improve it nothing is always. Also I told myself that if the teachers did not like my work I decided to never give up and keep improving to make my work better. This went great for me. 

In ICT I have noticed that the thinking process are the most variable methods for being creative original and solving the problems. The thinking process includes empathising, define, ideate, prototype and test. The empathising represent engaging and encouraging while working in a group to share the ideas and understanding by communicating and discussing. The define is where I have to gather all information and ideas together to create the prototype or concept.  In the ideate, I used in my induvial and group projects were brainstorming to stimulate the concept by adding positive and negative effects, this can support my concept by finding any solutions for problems that might occur in the future. The prototype, it is experimental process to where you have to self-check the concept or the ideas by producing the prototype. The testing, testing is the process to test the prototype by sharing with our lectures such as Clinton or some others. Therefore, it leads to feedback which can be used to change the concept or starting the whole process over. These thinking process supported me to solve the several problems that have occurred during the studio projects.

My second core paper is “Programming for Creativity. I am quite new to programming and it has to been a tough semester of it so far. I feel that it just not my area of learning. I have learnt so far Pure Data and Processing so far both I feel have been difficult for me to learn. I love computers but programming I just find it to find hard. In high school we always had the option to do what we wanted weather that’s programming or data basing so I always went with data basing and now it’s kind of flipped on me. The test and assignment for Pure data I felt went well however It didn’t as I missed out on passing. However, with processing my goal is to ace the assignment and test and pass the course so I don’t have to take it again next year. In programing I have learned that everything requires practice. Just reading notes is not going to help you have to physically do programming to get better. That’s happened with me so far with Processing I have done a couple of exercises and I’m slowly getting better.

Studio is my third core paper. I really did not know what studio was going to be about. I was quite anxious to know what’s the semester going to be like. Hearing words like collaborating and exploring made me realize that this course will make me and others come out of comfort zone and will challenge myself to make brilliant new original ideas. My first project that I did this Semester was the Cards for Play. I worked in a group with three other people and I was required to produce a Card Game that was is creative and original. My original thinking was that the task would not be too hard whatsoever as we are only producing a game however this completely back flipped. As a group we were struggling to come up with an Idea as it took us a week to think of. I remember we were excited and motivated toward the production feeling we had nailed the project. But when the prototype cards were shown to our lecturer Ben it ended up being very disappointing.  The lecturer said our Card Game Concept was boring and ideas are too basic and did not have the wow factor I still remember his words “It’s boring; you can’t destroy anyone”. My group members including myself lost motivation, even though this was the great experience to understand how important the feedbacks can be. With the feedback I feel that it really benefited us and that if we didn’t get it we wouldn’t have made a card game enjoyable for others. We then decided to change the concept of the cards for play from the script and started with a brand-new idea with mathematical number cards which end up well. This ended up being much better than the drinking game as It was more interesting. I learned in this project that you cannot skip the thinking process if you don’t spend time developing your idea it will not turn out good. In the future I have to be careful and use my time wisely when making something.

My second project was Sound. There were three tasks of Sound which was Creating instrument, Soundscape and Performance. The first two tasks, producing instrument and soundscape were individual work. I found these two very fun, with Soundscape it was cool getting different sounds and mixing them into a soundtrack. I took sounds from my favourite games and mixed them and did sound very funny to me personally. The soundscape I felt lived up to my expectation I felt that I made something that was original was unique and that was well composed.   With making an instrument it was a struggle thinking of something but when Clinton gave me the advice of “Try to get away from making an already made instrument” I had an Idea. I decided to make a Whistle piano. The production of the instrument was enjoyable as I bought whistles from the $2 shop and my materials from the workshop it was cool spending time making something that you feel could be a great showcase of yourself as a Creative Technologist. The only negative with my instrument was that when I glued the whistles onto the wood it was staying and continually falling of which led me to be very careful with it when playing and walking around with it. The performance task was another group project so I decided to work with my previous group from Cards for Play. We had to share our instruments and soundscapes but all our concept was different from other. This made the concept mixed up and gave a problem to solve. Therefore, we had an idea to create a soundscape by using all the members sound samples and play the instrument toward the sound of beats which we felt could be very cool. It was a difficult and complicate task but there was only one way to complete the project in our minds. I was assigned to make sure that our instruments were up to sound scratch meaning that I had to figure how loud each instrument has to be by for the performance to be also I was in charge of finding good background music as well. Overall it felt daunting as a group to go up and perform but in the end we had to come over fear and we did. With sound I learned that even if we aren’t good with it we should at least give it a shot and test our creative mind. I kept thinking I am not good with sound and I am going to fail it no! that’s not right as a Creative Technologist I have to think positive and challenge myself as well as believing myself that I can achieve anything possible.

The last project I did for Studio Was Spaceship Earth 2050. This was the project I felt was I did not enjoy the most. Even though I kept reading the brief I still did not understand what it was asking me to do as well as what’s the point we are trying to get across. The task was to create a movie film based on e-waste and 2050. I was having the problem of what I should do, do I talk about the future technologies in 2050 or e-waste in 2050. Even though it was a group work all of my group was struggling to understand the project. I had then decided with my group to work on how e-waste can affect the environment in 2050. The script and storyboard was written by teammate Sushmita with struggle we would continually disagree on when a scene would come in or which information shows up however this helped us in to making a video sharper, clever and better. We wanted our video to stand out from the rest so we decided to make it animation. This required heaps of time however it was worth it as it was so fun to play around with different animations. Personally I was confident with the script I thought we did a good job with it but still need a bit of fixing up. In the end my group and I had decided with a script which explains the e-waste and how it can end up in 2050’s environment. This was the project which I felt was more confusing and challenging however thanks to the lecturer’s continuous feedback we became more confident and ended up making a good unique original video. From the E-Waste Project I learned that we should not be scared of asking the teacher for help. Any problems we are having we have to address with them it will help and benefit us in the long run plus it help us achieve great grades.

Overall in the 10 weeks of this course so I far I have made the conclusion that creative technologies are about being yourself it’s about showcasing your true self and your creative mind. In creative technologies it’s not about the end outcome or being perfect it’s about the time that you put into your work, collaborating with other people and stepping to the limit to see how creative you can be. One thing I have noticed is that in Creative Technologies the words perfect or done is like a cuss word it does not exist because each day your trying to improve your idea and as a creative technologist we should not feel satisfied with our ideas we always want to keep thinking of ways to improve them. Sometimes I lost motivation however because of collaboration I have builded relationships with people I like to call friends and family they support me whenever on my ideas and give me feedback in a respectable manner. I feel being challenged and getting out of our comfort zone is the main component of this course it helps me and others think outside the box, becoming more original and creative as well it could be a big asset in the upcoming years of my degree. Creative technologies have help me learn about reflecting my work and blog posting. Blog posting has just become a common thing to do now every day for me.

[sushmita-devi]

There’s no such thing as ‘perfect’. Because we already stated we would be finalising our product today, but nothing like that happened.

There’s always that one person questioning which literally helped us think harder about the concept. We had planned our 'cards for play’ a week ago and iterated through the change of games until we got to a decent one which is suitable for all ages over the matured age. But every time it was play tested, there was one faulty of either the design or the rules. Eventually, these were fixed and reiterated again and again until all the members were satisfied and understood what was happening. One of the things we needed to keep in mind was the amount of cards that was distributed out to individuals and also what cards and if it would be fare on others too.

Working with this team is very challenging in a way that one member comes up with an idea and the other disagrees in a way it gets questioned by the other two. There’s small things that most of us haven’t agreed to till this date. But this conflict we’ve had was one of the best opportunities we’ve experienced and helped the individuals build that relationship up with others in the group. This was definitely something we were all warned in the first day of lecture. We were all aware of it in a way we made sure nobody left the group because at first we decided to do this project in a group and I guess we expected to create something in a group and submit it in a group instead of having people pulling out, breaking the groups motivation of working together as a team. I know people shouldn’t be expecting much from a group but not everyone had the same mind set and we all saw potential in the other members in the team. We believed in one another. Even this is the last week of the project, I feel proud working with this group even though we still haven’t finalised our product nor the rules. The challenge we all faced as individual helped us develop our ideas to the point we applied our knowledge to the tutors feedback we got a week ago and realised where we went wrong and what needed to be fixed.

Every Monday lectures we’ve attended so far was worth it. Everything the tutors mentioned was possible. From what the project would be like to the people’s behaviour towards working with groups to the conflict we all be facing to what the final product may or should be looking like.

After today’s class, we have had briefly designed our product which was two times more upgraded than the prototype, and tested the game we’ve designed and also the two possible games the players would play or make up their own as the cards are designed in a way it would allow the players to come up with many different games and played with the exact same cards.

I have roughly printed out and laminated the final product today. We will all distribute the papers out and cut it tomorrow and test it again and iterate it even more is necessary. I feel that even the players would find a way to iterate the product until they’re satisfied with the game too.

#tobecontinued…

[aurelliocheek]

The Making of A Juggler’s Tale

The development story of a student game project that won several awards.

When we started working on the idea of A Juggler’s Tale in Spring 2017, we never planned that this game would accompany us for over three years. Started as a student prototype that we created within a few weeks, we are currently founding our own game development company around it, are working together with a publisher and look forward to a release of the game on both PC and all the major consoles.

A Juggler‘s Tale is an atmospheric puzzle platformer centred around a puppet ­theatre play and the connection between string puppets and their puppet master. The player experiences the story of little Abby, an imprisoned circus artiste. She escapes the circus and gets to explore a fairytale world. After a brief moment of freedom, Abby finds herself dragged into the dangers the world has to offer: She has to cross raging rivers, bandit camps and traps, always ­accompanied by the lyrical rhymes of the narrator and puppet master.

The narrator plays a big part in the game because he gives all the puppets their voice and because he is responsible for the story the audience and player gets to experience. He talks about Abby‘s fears and helps her in difficult situations – while holding the strings of his puppet firmly in his ever-helpful hands. But things are getting more complicated when the player starts to interfere with the narrator‘s story. The player has to solve small, story-based riddles centered around the mystical puppet theatre setting. The puppet strings are not only a visual representation of the strong connection between narrator and puppet, but they are also our main gameplay mechanic, creating lots of unique puzzle moments. We wanted to link modern digital gaming culture with traditional, established t­heatre and poetry culture. Germany, our home country, can look back on centuries of fairy tales, poetry and drama. We grew up between these tales, legends and worlds – and combining these narratives with our love for story-driven games was our motivation to develop a game with this setting and story.

A Juggler’s Tale has a more modern, stylized artstyle.

Development Story We are all students of Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg, an internationally renowned university for film, animation and interactive media. Instead of having regular classes, our courses are centered around the projects many small student groups are currently developing, with lecturers being invited on demand. In one of these project phases (4 months) during our second year, we started developing the idea for ­A ­Juggler’s Tale – a game with five theatrical chapters, dozens of locations and puzzles. After realizing that we would never be able to create the game that we were aiming for within such a small project phase, we put all our energy into creating a vertical slice of one chapter, already including all the elements that we would like to have in the final game: the interactive narration, a few story-based puzzles, NPCs and great, stylized visuals. We were quite happy with the result – and after a year of other university projects, we had the opportunity to take a break year to get some working experience.

We decided to use this year to do a test run for a studio experience in this group with the help of our former lecturer Sven Bergmann. We were lucky enough to receive funding from the Digital Content Fund from Baden-Württemberg for this project, so we could rent an office in our hometown. During this one year, we gained a lot of team working experience and made big progress on the ­development of the game. At the end of the year, the game was in a state that we could confidently submit to a few festivals and award shows. And surprisingly we could not only win Germany’s main game award Deutscher Computerspielpreis as “Best Newcomer Prototype” but also six out of twelve possible awards at Game Connection Europe 2019 (Grand Award, Best Art, Best Narrative, Best PC, Best Upcoming, Best Casual). And we are nominated as “Best Student Game” at IGF Awards in San Francisco.

This took us by surprise and made us believe in the game even more – we are now finishing the production during our final year of university as a co-production between our company and the university and with the additional help of a publisher. Looking back at the past few years, we are just really happy how everything turned out and that we now are not only confident working together but also have the opportunity actually to bring this game to the market.

The camera limitations of a sidescroller made designing the final images of the game easier.

Working in a tiny team We worked on A Juggler’s Tale in a very small group, mainly consisting of only three students. Steffen was responsible for the story and narration design as well as the 3D Art, Enzio for core programming, shading and lighting and Dominik for gameplay design and programming as well as level art. But when you work in such a small team, it is quite natural that everyone is constantly changing roles. On the one hand, this creates a lot of creative variety. On the other hand, it is sometimes tough to focus on one important task, because there are so many things depending on various other things you need to do. For the final months of the project, Elias will join our team and help us with programming and art – and we also already got and will get a lot of external help from other fellow students, for example in the fields of music & sound, concept art, motion design and animation.

Finding a visual style Without a concept artist in our core team, finding a visual style was tough. We got inspired by various artists online and knew that we’d like to have a more modern, stylized look – but we also didn’t want to neglect the physical background of the string puppets. As the game is divided into several chapters, we had the idea to have a more realistic puppet theatre with wooden backdrops at the beginning and the end of each chapter. Once the player enters the chapter, the backdrops change into the stylized artwork – the player dives into the world of the puppet theatre, forgetting everything around it. Only the puppet strings remain there to remind the player of the connection between all the characters and the narrator. Although our theatre play takes place in medieval times, we didn’t want to go for the typical medieval look but fell in love with a much more colourful, modern style – sometimes, our sky is green or red, the grass purple, etc. Our environments should reflect the mood of the story and don’t follow any real-world rules.

We use our textures to save object types and color ­variations instead of the actual colors.

With our team’s more technical background, our art and level-art workflow has a more technical approach than usual. Instead of texturing, we decided to generate colour ID textures for all our assets with information saved in the meshes vertex ­colours as well as in every colour channel of the texture. After bringing all the saved information together in our shaders, we were able to create a system that we internally call colour volumes: Every asset uses the same colour collection that we can modify with placeable volumes in the engine. Similar to the Unreal Engine post-process volumes we can place colour volumes in our levels that gradually change the colour of the environment based on the player position. To bring an example, we can always use the same tree, but change its leaf colour based on the location of the main character in the level, enabling us to tell great looking ­atmospheric changes and giving us the flexibility to change the whole look of a level at the very end of the design process. Apart from the assets colour, our colour volumes also control the fog, light, wind, etc. of the environment, making it easy to do visual changes quickly and thereby enabling an ­iterative design workflow.

Animation workarounds Another problem we had to solve because of our team constellation was the animations of the game. Without a team member capable of doing proper animation, we had to find some creative solutions to get to our animations. We were lucky enough to be able to do professional mocap animation recording at our university, but most of our standard animations are actually from the online motion capture database Mixamo from Adobe. But instead of using a single animation, we often stitched multiple ­animations together with Blender to create the exact animation we need. This felt very clumsy at first, but over the course of the project, we became experts in finding and misusing parts of animations for our needs. Of course, this does not always work (and you can’t mocap everything), for specific animations we still had to do a lot of animations by hand, but we could reduce the animation work quite a lot. Apart from that, we use a lot of the Unreal Engines physical animation functionality to create a more string-puppet like movement. Usually, only 80% of the movement is driven by animation data and 20% is being simulated in ­real-time. This creates a very cute physical animation style, for example, when our main character Abby jumps, her arms and legs wiggle around in the air, and every jump looks and feels quite different.

The assets are being colorized within the engine, with our so called “Color Volumes”.

Our Narration Workflow The narrator tells a theatrical story and therefore uses poetic language to describe the environment, to give puzzle hints and to speak for all the characters: “Little Abby takes a pause and stops with a shiver / If you want to be free, you’ll have to cross the river! / If worse comes to worst, you can count on me / Those strings on your hands are wings, you see!” We wanted to have both English and German narration, so we had to find a way to this kind of poetry in both languages. We created a huge spreadsheet with detailed descriptions, dummy sentences and estimates of the length of the sentences. After that, a German writer (Manuel Ostwald) wrote our German narration with our feedback on the overall tone and style of the poetry. We were lucky enough also to know an English writer (David Maas) who lived in Germany for the last couple of years – he transcribed the German narration into beautiful English poetry. Of course, not all the sentences say the same thing in both languages, but with our description and the German text, David could create poetry that transported the same message or atmosphere as in the German version. The narrator in A Juggler’s Tale is omnipresent because of the interaction between the string puppets and narrator, so we put a lot of work into finding a narration style that is interesting to listen to but not annoying ­after a short time.

Most of the story and design work was done the oldschool way, on the walls of our office.

Finding a unique gameplay element We found out about our true “unique gameplay” when we were already pretty far in development, while programming and designing puzzles for chapter 4. It’s a chapter where the role of the player changes from passively running away to actively interacting with and challenging other string puppets. Because of the puppet strings, there is a lot of physical movement restriction in these kinds of puzzles – string puppets can’t hide under objects or can get stuck and the strings entangled. All these game mechanics sounded interesting, but we had to change the way our puppet strings work so that they actually could do these things. We programmed our version of a Cable Component in Unreal Engine that could do things like being ripped or being attached to multiple points. Suddenly, we saw a lot of new possibilities for puzzles in the earlier chapters, so we had and still have to iterate over these chapters again. Where we used to try to build the levels in a way that the character never walks beneath objects, we now plan to add more of these objects, using this physical restriction for a interesting story and puzzle moments. With our new puppet strings, we can also add a lot of nice little details like them getting entangled in the branches of a tree when the player walks beneath it, for example.

Our puppet strings can be attached to multiple actors in the scene.

The Future & Conclusion In the upcoming months, we will finish the level and puzzle design for the game and then concentrate on visual and gameplay polishing. The art for some chapters is still missing, the narration has to be rewritten at some points, and we still want to add a lot of details for attentive players to spot. There is a lot of work to be done, but with over a year of university left we are quite confident that we can bring the game to a level of quality that we are proud of. We can only encourage everyone in a similar situation as we were to believe in your project and team. For us, being able to find this team and working together at university – a place where you can experiment and try something out in a more controlled environment – was the biggest win we could have hoped for. We often overestimated our working capacity, and it took us quite a long time to find the right working structure and task distribution. But we are very happy we had these setbacks and failures, as we are only getting better in these things. We are excited about the future projects our small team will create and of course about the actual player feedback we will receive for our launch title – but until then, there is still a long – but fun and creative – way to go!

Dominik Schön Game Designer

Dominik started developing games when he was still in school. After being a game and level design intern in two major German studios (King Art, Mimimi Games) he started studying Interactive Media at Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg. In January 2020 he and his study friends founded the development studio kaleidoscube.

The post The Making of A Juggler’s Tale appeared first on Making Games.

The Making of A Juggler’s Tale published first on https://leolarsonblog.tumblr.com/

[elizbethwolf]

All About Scribble Color Scanning Pen – Buy for Cheap

What Is The Scribble Pen?

Publicly known as ““revolutionary pen that draws in any color!”” the Scribble color scanning and print pen in short words is a very advanced pen that is capable to scan “any color in the world” from any surface and then copy/replicate that color for pen writing. Color scanning is also meant for digital uses as you can extract color code from the pen. This revolutionary pen has been calling the attention of all media for the last year, Scribble pen solves a lot of situations for practical home and industry uses.

During this article we will discuss what main uses for the Scribble Color Scanning Pen, how it works, provide you instructions and videos on how to use it, where to buy it for cheap and more!

Scribble Story Starts at KickStarter

Back in early 2011, a group of dreamers submitted a project for funding in favor of the Scribble prototype project, it was an instant global hit as people went crazy to support the creators of this incredible idea. It was promising then and still very promising after almost 10 years of its submission for budget support.

Unfortunately, the Scribble color scanning and printing pen project had to be canceled as it called the attention of the KickStarter team right away. They were concerned that this project was just promising fake future results on technology that actually didn’t exist at the time. So the Kickstarter team reached out to the creators of the budget claim project to see if they could provide some sort of proof or a provisional functional prototype.

With this prototype request by KickStarter, they could at least proof that the project was not only based on dreams but a real and actual object might be already in the works. But the team was not ready to show anything close to their dreams and this caused the project to be canceled from funding raising. Over $300,000 were raised within the first few hours of the project being published, all these were returned to the actual bidders after the Scribble project got canceled.

Funding Was Born

Later they responded that the team of KickStarter didn’t have to panic. A video with explanatory samples on how they are going to develop de Scribble project was going to be released soon. But instead, the Scribble team opted to just walk out of that KickStarter system. Instead, they created their own crowdfunding system far from the “arbitrary” specifications that blocked the funding in the first place. It didn’t have much trust by themselves as expected, so the team had to fall again into another funding source called “Tilt”.

Bidders see the product up for bidding for 3rd time, something is not looking clear here and the support falls to 2/3 of what the raised in the first campaign. Still, over $200,000 was more than enough to get the project running but another problem surged at this time. The fund sourcing team also requested more information about the project, same situation as before. Ended up canceling the project, again! A working 100% prototype was not possible to have in hand at that time as the technology needed to create it didn’t exist yet, the reason why they needed the funds.

Who said beginnings were easy? Funny thing is that other fund-raisers using the same application, haven’t found this difficulty even with less productive and accurate working prototypes.

Weird Bad Vibes Against Scribble Pen Capabilities and Prototype Tests

Once the first useful prototype was successfully made, a video was recorded to prove that the pen actually works and does exactly as promised before against all odds and probabilities. But something really weird happened, during the film of the video, some frames overlapped the video as if it was edited. ( Picture above this paragraph shows the difference ) Causing a mass doubt thru the public thinking that the video could just be a fake. This hurt the trust the Scribble team had and it just got worse after Reddit took the topic as well. We all know Reddit, one of the biggest threat and conversational forum in the world, people love it to discuss topics on this site.

This evolved to a crowd of people investigating if the fact that a pen-like this was possible, or even a prototype was made that the story went on and on. Now people moved investigation among bloggers and article writers about the topic. Even an interview was found as a fake too, as the person “interviewed” didn’t actually exist. This is a known method for just fast online promotion but, didn’t work so well for the scribble team as it was looking really bad. As the investigation continued, these people discovered who was the “real person” behind all of these crowdfunding projects and it was not the company founders or owners. As no information was found locally or within any tech forum in the area where they supposedly lived. Only information about Scribble founders was only found on same Scribble website as if they didn’t exist at all.

The Research Goes On

The research kept on going looking out for companies registered within the United States for the last 2 years with anything similar to a pen within the company title, nothing was found. So if they were running this company under personal liability, any promised not accomplished could be sued against funding owner personal assets. All these looked really weird at that time. The only way to take this project out to the public was to fabricate a few Scribble pens as a prototype and send them to the main influencers in the media for them to try it out and speak for the product.

Gaining the Trust of The Influencers

Some of the top influencers signed in for a sample prototype so they could be the first in the world to try such a new technology. But continuous emails from Scribble team saying that there are delays and having difficulties to complete the prototypes so they couldn’t deliver until after a few months. These bloggers were publishing every step of the way and it was looking really bad for the eyes of the crowdfunding prospects at that time.

At this point, they were trying to sell the prototypes with the promise of getting them after a year of your order. By that time in 2016, the company was looking like a scam proposition and everybody turned away their support to the cause.

The story goes on and on but for the most part, we just wanted to give you a feel and look at how new and impressive technology has so many drawbacks in the beginning before it gets to the store for you to buy for a very cheap price.

The History Behind The Scribble Pen Technology

The Scribble team declared a 2 years intense design and technology path to get the pen to its final shape as we see it today. A lot of changes to the mechanism and the design of the pen were made as they needed it to be ready for home and commercial. At the same time, they also needed to make sure it will work free of defects. Knowing it is also going to be used for home applications, the size of the Scribble product had to be small. A small scanner and printer that could fit in your hand? A lot of innovations and new technology had to be invented to get this done with all the features it carries and the small size it has.

After the few first prototypes were made, the next challenge was to make it “bulletproof”. Remember the small piece of technology like this comes with a lot of internal, small and sensitive parts spooled very tight together. Even a small drop to the floor could be devastating if extra measures are not taken into count for the final production of the Scribble pen.

Thanks to the Scribble team, innovations never seen before were made possible for the color reproducing industry. Many of this new technology could improve the quality, size, speed, and cost of all of the future equipment with similar functionality.

How They Make It All Possible And SO SMALL

We figure you might still be curious about how they got all these functions together within a very little but resistant and functional tool. So here are some facts on the science behind the tech and how this device get it did and don’t expect us to say its just magic (LOL). Here are some specifications as established on their official website:

Scribble Stylus Pen

CompatibilityiOS 7+, Android 4.0+ConnectivityBluetooth, USBBattery Life15 hoursColor SensorRGB SensorTipSoft rubber tips includedDimension169 x 14.33mm (6.65 x 0.56 in.)

What Can The Scribble Pen Do?

The pen has so many technology parts in it, that once you start to describe it, you might be thinking, HOW THEY FIT ALL THESE IN A LITTLE PEN? But yes, the pen carries a small eye sensor to capture the color in an object near it. It is very small and easy to clean. The eye/sensor captures the color in an RGB format and converts the color into a popular color palette code for easy replication. Simply point the pen into the direction of anything you need the color replicated, and hit the button. A little stripe around the sensor will light up with the tone of the new color being copied, save the color to then write with it or just for later use and sync it to your cellphone or device, Isn’t that cool?

How to Re-fill Ink?

Offered in their website and almost any used website store over the internet, you can find the “Refillable Ink Cartridge”, in their own words: Scribble’s ink cartridge connects to a mixer and dispenser that exactly recreates the color you have scanned. Each cartridge comes with 30 miles of ink, and new cartridges cost less than $10!… I believe they have said it all. Looks really simple to use and to install.

Drawing Process

For your convenience, the scribble pen came with 3 drawing tips for different textures and feel. This allows you to express yourself with a different character, maybe thinner may be bolder. Gives you the will of choosing which size tip you need in case you are writing or drawing.

Do They Offer Guarantee?

The bad part is that the pen is actually NOT STILL AVAILABLE after so many years. We are not sure if this is a scam company or what. But we did a little research and found the competence that is already building and selling samples of these sort of pens and you could buy one right now with no waiting lines and no possibilities of being scammed.

Where to Buy a Similar Pen for Cheap?

The best choice is to look at Amazon and eBay for similar pens that are already available to the public. We ran a little search for eBay and found a very cheap $25 scribble-like pen available from China. (Screenshot Below). It looks very futuristic and is also sold with an extended guarantee so you won’t be scammed as advice earlier. Also, no need to pay almost $250 for a pen that doesn’t even exist yet as seen on Scribble website.

buy-cheap-scribble-like-pen

Unfortunately, Amazon doesn’t carry any type of similar pens as we ran a search there too for possible prototypes or new products. Stick with eBay if you want to give this a test run.

 Source:

Futurism.com

eBay

Scribblepen.com

ChimiPrinting-019

The post All About Scribble Color Scanning Pen – Buy for Cheap appeared first on Cheap 55 Printing.

Published First on https://cheap55printing.com/ All About Scribble Color Scanning Pen – Buy for Cheap posted first on https://cheap55printing.com/

[sheliabarley]

All About Scribble Color Scanning Pen – Buy for Cheap

What Is The Scribble Pen?

Publicly known as ““revolutionary pen that draws in any color!”” the Scribble color scanning and print pen in short words is a very advanced pen that is capable to scan “any color in the world” from any surface and then copy/replicate that color for pen writing. Color scanning is also meant for digital uses as you can extract color code from the pen. This revolutionary pen has been calling the attention of all media for the last year, Scribble pen solves a lot of situations for practical home and industry uses.

During this article we will discuss what main uses for the Scribble Color Scanning Pen, how it works, provide you instructions and videos on how to use it, where to buy it for cheap and more!

Scribble Story Starts at KickStarter

Back in early 2011, a group of dreamers submitted a project for funding in favor of the Scribble prototype project, it was an instant global hit as people went crazy to support the creators of this incredible idea. It was promising then and still very promising after almost 10 years of its submission for budget support.

Unfortunately, the Scribble color scanning and printing pen project had to be canceled as it called the attention of the KickStarter team right away. They were concerned that this project was just promising fake future results on technology that actually didn’t exist at the time. So the Kickstarter team reached out to the creators of the budget claim project to see if they could provide some sort of proof or a provisional functional prototype.

With this prototype request by KickStarter, they could at least proof that the project was not only based on dreams but a real and actual object might be already in the works. But the team was not ready to show anything close to their dreams and this caused the project to be canceled from funding raising. Over $300,000 were raised within the first few hours of the project being published, all these were returned to the actual bidders after the Scribble project got canceled.

Funding Was Born

Later they responded that the team of KickStarter didn’t have to panic. A video with explanatory samples on how they are going to develop de Scribble project was going to be released soon. But instead, the Scribble team opted to just walk out of that KickStarter system. Instead, they created their own crowdfunding system far from the “arbitrary” specifications that blocked the funding in the first place. It didn’t have much trust by themselves as expected, so the team had to fall again into another funding source called “Tilt”.

Bidders see the product up for bidding for 3rd time, something is not looking clear here and the support falls to 2/3 of what the raised in the first campaign. Still, over $200,000 was more than enough to get the project running but another problem surged at this time. The fund sourcing team also requested more information about the project, same situation as before. Ended up canceling the project, again! A working 100% prototype was not possible to have in hand at that time as the technology needed to create it didn’t exist yet, the reason why they needed the funds.

Who said beginnings were easy? Funny thing is that other fund-raisers using the same application, haven’t found this difficulty even with less productive and accurate working prototypes.

Weird Bad Vibes Against Scribble Pen Capabilities and Prototype Tests

Once the first useful prototype was successfully made, a video was recorded to prove that the pen actually works and does exactly as promised before against all odds and probabilities. But something really weird happened, during the film of the video, some frames overlapped the video as if it was edited. ( Picture above this paragraph shows the difference ) Causing a mass doubt thru the public thinking that the video could just be a fake. This hurt the trust the Scribble team had and it just got worse after Reddit took the topic as well. We all know Reddit, one of the biggest threat and conversational forum in the world, people love it to discuss topics on this site.

This evolved to a crowd of people investigating if the fact that a pen-like this was possible, or even a prototype was made that the story went on and on. Now people moved investigation among bloggers and article writers about the topic. Even an interview was found as a fake too, as the person “interviewed” didn’t actually exist. This is a known method for just fast online promotion but, didn’t work so well for the scribble team as it was looking really bad. As the investigation continued, these people discovered who was the “real person” behind all of these crowdfunding projects and it was not the company founders or owners. As no information was found locally or within any tech forum in the area where they supposedly lived. Only information about Scribble founders was only found on same Scribble website as if they didn’t exist at all.

The Research Goes On

The research kept on going looking out for companies registered within the United States for the last 2 years with anything similar to a pen within the company title, nothing was found. So if they were running this company under personal liability, any promised not accomplished could be sued against funding owner personal assets. All these looked really weird at that time. The only way to take this project out to the public was to fabricate a few Scribble pens as a prototype and send them to the main influencers in the media for them to try it out and speak for the product.

Gaining the Trust of The Influencers

Some of the top influencers signed in for a sample prototype so they could be the first in the world to try such a new technology. But continuous emails from Scribble team saying that there are delays and having difficulties to complete the prototypes so they couldn’t deliver until after a few months. These bloggers were publishing every step of the way and it was looking really bad for the eyes of the crowdfunding prospects at that time.

At this point, they were trying to sell the prototypes with the promise of getting them after a year of your order. By that time in 2016, the company was looking like a scam proposition and everybody turned away their support to the cause.

The story goes on and on but for the most part, we just wanted to give you a feel and look at how new and impressive technology has so many drawbacks in the beginning before it gets to the store for you to buy for a very cheap price.

The History Behind The Scribble Pen Technology

The Scribble team declared a 2 years intense design and technology path to get the pen to its final shape as we see it today. A lot of changes to the mechanism and the design of the pen were made as they needed it to be ready for home and commercial. At the same time, they also needed to make sure it will work free of defects. Knowing it is also going to be used for home applications, the size of the Scribble product had to be small. A small scanner and printer that could fit in your hand? A lot of innovations and new technology had to be invented to get this done with all the features it carries and the small size it has.

After the few first prototypes were made, the next challenge was to make it “bulletproof”. Remember the small piece of technology like this comes with a lot of internal, small and sensitive parts spooled very tight together. Even a small drop to the floor could be devastating if extra measures are not taken into count for the final production of the Scribble pen.

Thanks to the Scribble team, innovations never seen before were made possible for the color reproducing industry. Many of this new technology could improve the quality, size, speed, and cost of all of the future equipment with similar functionality.

How They Make It All Possible And SO SMALL

We figure you might still be curious about how they got all these functions together within a very little but resistant and functional tool. So here are some facts on the science behind the tech and how this device get it did and don’t expect us to say its just magic (LOL). Here are some specifications as established on their official website:

Scribble Stylus Pen

Compatibility iOS 7+, Android 4.0+ Connectivity Bluetooth, USB Battery Life 15 hours Color Sensor RGB Sensor Tip Soft rubber tips included Dimension 169 x 14.33mm (6.65 x 0.56 in.)

What Can The Scribble Pen Do?

The pen has so many technology parts in it, that once you start to describe it, you might be thinking, HOW THEY FIT ALL THESE IN A LITTLE PEN? But yes, the pen carries a small eye sensor to capture the color in an object near it. It is very small and easy to clean. The eye/sensor captures the color in an RGB format and converts the color into a popular color palette code for easy replication. Simply point the pen into the direction of anything you need the color replicated, and hit the button. A little stripe around the sensor will light up with the tone of the new color being copied, save the color to then write with it or just for later use and sync it to your cellphone or device, Isn’t that cool?

How to Re-fill Ink?

Offered in their website and almost any used website store over the internet, you can find the “Refillable Ink Cartridge”, in their own words: Scribble’s ink cartridge connects to a mixer and dispenser that exactly recreates the color you have scanned. Each cartridge comes with 30 miles of ink, and new cartridges cost less than $10!… I believe they have said it all. Looks really simple to use and to install.

Drawing Process

For your convenience, the scribble pen came with 3 drawing tips for different textures and feel. This allows you to express yourself with a different character, maybe thinner may be bolder. Gives you the will of choosing which size tip you need in case you are writing or drawing.

Do They Offer Guarantee?

The bad part is that the pen is actually NOT STILL AVAILABLE after so many years. We are not sure if this is a scam company or what. But we did a little research and found the competence that is already building and selling samples of these sort of pens and you could buy one right now with no waiting lines and no possibilities of being scammed.

Where to Buy a Similar Pen for Cheap?

The best choice is to look at Amazon and eBay for similar pens that are already available to the public. We ran a little search for eBay and found a very cheap $25 scribble-like pen available from China. (Screenshot Below). It looks very futuristic and is also sold with an extended guarantee so you won’t be scammed as advice earlier. Also, no need to pay almost $250 for a pen that doesn’t even exist yet as seen on Scribble website.

buy-cheap-scribble-like-pen

Unfortunately, Amazon doesn’t carry any type of similar pens as we ran a search there too for possible prototypes or new products. Stick with eBay if you want to give this a test run.

Source:

Futurism.com

eBay

Scribblepen.com

ChimiPrinting-019

The post All About Scribble Color Scanning Pen – Buy for Cheap appeared first on Cheap 55 Printing.

Source: https://cheap55printing.com/ All About Scribble Color Scanning Pen – Buy for Cheap published first on https://cheap55printing.com/

[allspark]

Goooooooood morning Allspark! It’s 0600 hours. What does the “O” stand for? Oh, my God, it’s been a long time since we’ve had one of these showcases! And we return you to this unregularly scheduled newspost with a very special Allspark Art Showcase of the week!

Our friend, and retired staff member, NightViper has shared with us an exclusive gallery and insight into this unproduced and unused mock-up custom concept of Headmaster Devcon with Slizardo that could have been produced through the Official Transformers Collectors’ Club. While the figure did not get produced by the club, this version of Devcon did receive reference in Club fiction through Star Dasher’s profile from the end of Beast Wars: Uprising‘s “Safe Spaces”

During my time as a contractor for Fun Publications – organizers of the Transformers Collectors’ Club and official collectors’ convention, BotCon – I was tasked with generating hundreds of digital concepts for potential Transformers exclusive product. Different colors, different characters, different toolings… whatever was needed to “sell” the ideas to those in authority to approve the final production of the pieces.

  Occasionally, though, I would go beyond a digital mock-up in attempt to more fully convince that a redeco or retool would be possible or would capture the character. The first time I created one of these mock-ups was for a concept that eventually was produced in 2011 – Shattered Glass Galvatron. Although that mock-up has long since changed hands and is in a private collection elsewhere, I’ve found a number of other mock-ups in storage and wish to share images with fans!

  The first mock-up that I wish to show has already been seen publicly at RoboCon 2016 in Cincinnati. However only the robot mode was displayed, so you’ll get a little “treat” seeing the alternate mode here!

  In 2015 when Titans Return was hitting store shelves (and Fun Publications still held the Transformers license), I was eagerly waiting to buy two Deluxe toys in particular. Blurr and Brainstorm. Seeing the two figures being based on the same toy and visualizing how the parts might be able to be swapped to create a composite, I set to work. I wanted to prove that Brainstorm’s wings and forearms could be placed on Blurr’s body, resulting in a more wedge-shaped space craft with rear-mounted wings and a scoop-like funnel on top. I wanted to make G1 Devcon’s spaceship mode! The figure being a Headmaster-type and thus allowing for a Slizzardo companion mini-figure was also a big factor in my pursuing the concept.

  Sometimes, though, retooled parts are not compatible with previous uses of the mold. The RiD Grimlock based on FoC Grimlock being an example (I’d wanted to put the Transmetal Megatron alternate head from the FoC use on the RiD tooling, but alas…). And so I had to show that it was possible. I also wanted to do an alternate assembly by attaching the folding seat in the opposite orientation from Blurr and Brainstorm so that the sculpted detail could be used to mimic Devcon’s stomach grill, and wished to clearly indicate this as well. I completed the mock-up, submitted images, and poised myself to fight for Devcon as the 2017 Club Incentive figure (the figure that collectors received for “free” after paying for Club Membership). Unfortunately, Hasbro passed on word that the license was not going to be renewed and my chance to push the concept further never happened.

  That’s not to say that the idea didn’t get into official material, though. Writer Jim Sorenson was influenced enough by the photos to include mention of a Headmaster Devcon and Slizzardo in one of his text-based stories published by Fun Publications in 2016 during the waning hours of the Transformers license. The concept found life! More or less…

  I have had this Devcon on display with other Transformers pre-production pieces and prototypes before it was moved into storage. In the past, I’ve felt that strongly that it should have been made. Time moves on, though, and I’m beginning to narrow my collection down into something far more manageable. I’ve decided to part with a number of these physical mock-ups from the Fun Publications days, and I’ve chosen to start with Devcon so he goes first and I can’t change my mind! I hope fans everywhere enjoy this look at the concept figure… and if there’s a collector out there looking to get a hold of a piece of Club/brand history, or is simply a huge Devcon fan, well, it’s my opinion that this is something that should belong to the fans!

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Find this one of a kind old Transformers Collectors’ Club Mock-Up Concept, and perhaps other concepts, at RoboCon 2020, June 5-6 at the Galt House in Louisville, Kentucky.

Not a member? Join our community by creating your own free account here! Or if you prefer, jump right into the live chat on our Discord server, our Facebook group, or just share your work directly in our DeviantArt page!

Special Allspark Art Showcase: Unused Headmaster Devcon with Slizardo Mock-Up Concept! Goooooooood morning Allspark! It’s 0600 hours. What does the “O” stand for? Oh, my God, it’s been a long time since we've had one of these showcases!

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Hey everyone - this is Pat from Starter Story - where I do interviews with successful founders on how they got started.Today, I have an amazing interview with Theo Lee, founder of KPOP Foods. Their mission is about bringing people together and uplifting spirits through Korean food.This is such a great interview. I know it's long, but I really do think it's worth the read.Here are some of the stats:Average Monthly Revenue: ~6KRevenue since September 2017: 100KInstagram followers: 11KEmail subscribers: 10KIn business since February 2017!---Hello! Who are you and what are you working on?Hi, my name is Theo Lee and I’m the co-founder and CEO of KPOP Foods.Today, the brand and story behind a company is critical for success and sustainability as consumers are driven towards companies and products making an impact.KPOP Foods is a Korean food company inviting people to discover and enjoy Korean flavors through its food products. Our approach is to become the Red Bull of Korean food by bringing together mainstream culture, art, music, and food.My co-founder, Mike Kim, and I are both Korean Americans and launched KPOP Foods because we wanted to build a Korean food brand that people could resonate with and embrace.Our mission was and continues to be about bringing people together and uplifting spirits through Korean food and flavors. When we looked at the Korean food companies in the market, we couldn’t find one that represented this spirit, so we decided to do it ourselves.Our first product is KPOP Sauce, a Korean chili sauce based on my grandma’s 70-year old recipe using Korean chili paste (aka gochujang). We debuted KPOP Sauce through a successful Kickstarter campaign last year in April that funded within the first eight hours of our campaign.We received Kickstarter’s stamp of approval as "A Project we Love" and were featured as “A Project of the Day” and ended the Kickstarter campaign with nearly $40,000 from over 1,200 backers.In April of this year, we launched our second product, KPOP Sea Snacks, a premium roasted and all-natural seaweed snack made here in the US.While still fairly new, KPOP Sea Snacks is already an Amazon’s Choice product and was featured in FabFitFun (a women’s quarterly subscription box) and Pinterest’s limited-edition, specially co-branded box called the P100.Most recently, we announced our new Head of Product and Product Development, celebrity chef, Chris Oh.Chris is developing several new sauces that we intend to launch in November and is also opening his network for opportunities in marketing, content, and partnerships. We’re really excited to have Chris onboard and to be working with him!Since September of last year, we’ve generated nearly $100,000 in revenue, primarily all online through our website and Amazon. Our products have earned the coveted Amazon’s Choice badge because they are unique and well -reviewed.We’ve entered over 90 specialty stores throughout the west coast and are currently raising an investment round to expand our distribution into major retailers.What's your backstory and how did you come up with the idea?Growing up in Korean American families, we were fortunate to be surrounded by Korean food all the time. However, along with the food, an important principle that was instilled in us was the connection between Korean food and family, friends, and fun.Mike and I met at business school at UCLA Anderson where we would take large groups of friends to Koreatown in Los Angeles to enjoy Korean food. Along with enjoying the food, our friends embraced the Korean culture and the energetic atmosphere.This is what sparked the idea for KPOP Foods. We wanted to replicate the sensory and social experience our friends had at Korean BBQ and share it with the world!I think a really important concept, especially for when just starting out, is being comfortable with launching things quickly.The UCLA Anderson community played, and continues to play, a major role in KPOP Foods. We took the concept and business plan for KPOP Foods through UCLA Anderson’s entrepreneurial classes and startup program called Business Creation Option, a field study option required for graduation.Prior to business school, Mike served in the U.S. Army and I came from a finance and banking background so neither of us had any real experience in food nor marketing.Our classmates, professors, and other members of faculty were instrumental in advising and helping us during our Kickstarter campaign, which launched during our final quarter at business school, and connecting us to potential investors, advisors, and food industry professionals.If you’d like to learn more, I’ve actually written a LinkedIn post about UCLA Anderson’s role in KPOP Foods.The Kickstarter campaign was key in validating our idea and giving us the confidence to pursue KPOP Foods full-time.But even before Kickstarter, we did hours of research, talking to CEOs and founders of other successful Kickstarter campaigns, running focus groups to test our brand story and variations of KPOP Sauce, and picking people’s brains on ideas for our Kickstarter video.We also found a way to create samples by buying little bento box soy sauce containers shaped like pigs and filling them up with KPOP Sauce to send to our friends and people interested across the nation.The samples were great as we were able to send them in the mail, keeping costs low as we paid for everything ourselves with our savings and credit cards. This was also helpful in getting the awareness of our Kickstarter campaign out to people.As MBA students, we had significant student loans and were presented with opportunities to work at great companies, but thanks to our Kickstarter campaign, we were able to raise an initial investment round, allowing us to pay ourselves a minimum salary to cover rent, loan payments, and basic living expenses.This was our chance to build something on our own and work for something that we truly loved so we dove right in.Describe the process of designing, prototyping, and manufacturing the product.Getting the ingredients rightThe reason we started with KPOP Sauce was because one of the key ingredients, gochujang (Korean chili paste), is a staple ingredient in Korean cuisine.Additionally, my grandma used to send me bottles of her gochujang sauce and my friends absolutely loved it, putting it on their eggs, grilled chicken, burgers, hot dogs, noodles, rice, and more.Given the versatility, we thought it was the right product to start with – a flavorful sauce that people could incorporate onto foods they already eat. Along with that, gochujang can be difficult to use given its thicker texture (think peanut butter), so the sauce made it much easier to use or cook with.We used my grandma’s recipe as a base and began tweaking things based on feedback. The most controversial ingredient turned out to be sesame oil – some people really liked it, others didn’t. When we removed the sesame oil, people still liked the sauce, so we took it out.Packaging & DesignWe also had to figure out the packaging, namely the bottle, cap, and label. Based on research and our focus groups, we wanted to be in a plastic bottle, so we went online and looked for as many different bottles as possible and asked people for their thoughts.We also used these bottles during the focus groups to test usability and to see which one people naturally gravitated towards.For label design, we found a designer, who I previously worked with at a previous startup, to help mock up some label designs. We gave him our story, ideas, and mock images to use as a style reference.We eventually narrowed the label designs down to two options and received feedback from friends and people. We also posted the designs to social media and received a ton of engagement and comments through that as well.Next, we had to find a manufacturer, or co-packer, to make our sauce at scale. I remember calling 15 to 20 different manufacturers and not getting anywhere, especially since we didn’t know how much we wanted to produce (time is literally money for manufacturers and since we hadn’t started our Kickstarter campaign, we didn’t know how much we needed to make in our first run).Finally, a co-packer we ended up working with, was nice enough to explain the process and offered to help.We learned that the first step was to find a food scientist to scale our recipe as things can quickly change when going from making small batches to hundreds of gallons.The food scientist would also help us with testing for shelf stability, analyzing the sauce for nutritional information, and submitting our application for the license to manufacture in California, otherwise known as a S-Letter.The person who explained the process to us sent over a list of potential food scientists - we were fortunate to find a food scientist through a friend of my uncle’s.I had several calls with the food scientist and met with him to make sure it was a good fit and he turned out to be great, explaining to us certain issues and basic concepts.Finding suppliersWhile the food scientist focused on the product, we shifted our focus towards finding suppliers, namely for packaging (bottles and caps) and key ingredients. We were fortunate to find a packaging supplier that was also able to assist with warehousing as the minimum order quantities for the bottles and caps were well above our first production run.Furthermore, we were able to negotiate a structure such that we only paid for the bottles and caps delivered to our manufacturer. This saved us a ton of money as the minimum order quantities for our caps was 25,000, yet we only needed 6,000 for our first run.Alongside packaging, we also sourced a quality ingredient supplier that turned out to be in the same area as our manufacturer, keeping the transportation costs low.After several months, we received our S-Letter and were ready to do our first production run for approximately 6,000 bottles. We’ve since completed 4 more production runs for KPOP Sauce, each time making small tweaks to the recipe as we’re always looking to improve.Chris is now working on developing several new sauces and we’ve already begun the development process and excited to launch the new products later this year.Describe the process of launching the business.Before launching our Kickstarter campaign, we made sure to have our website and social media accounts up and running.We bought the domain for kpopfoods.com through godaddy.com for less than $20 a year and used Shopify to build our website.In the beginning, we focused on building our social media accounts, mainly Instagram and Facebook. We used our website for credibility and a way to share our story while offering samples to promote our Kickstarter campaign.After fulfilling all of our Kickstarter orders on-time in August, we were ready to begin selling nationally through our website in September. We picked up a number of re-orders from our Kickstarter campaign in the first couple of weeks and also began testing Facebook and Google ads.In the beginning, we struggled to get conversions, leading to a higher customer acquisition cost than initially expected, however we learned a lot about our user flow and funnel. We’ve gone through countless iterations of our website to improve the UI/UX.In October, we entered Amazon through "Fulfillment By Amazon" (FBA) and this was when things really began to take off.We were fortunate to pick up a number of five-star reviews immediately from customers and Kickstarter backers, allowing us to become an “Amazon’s Choice” product within the first week. We soon became the #1 new selling chili sauce on Amazon for the next three consecutive months.Since launch, what has worked to attract and retain customers?As we started to see high levels of conversions on Amazon, sometimes as high as 30%, we began changing our digital marketing strategy.RetargetingWe were able to get clicks to our website at a very low cost per click, and thanks to some PR initiatives, SEO optimization, and content development (both video and blog articles), we were able to increase sessions to our website to 150 to 200 a day.We would then retarget our website visitors with Facebook ads, driving them to Amazon and continued to see high conversions. As we began talking to other CEOs and CMOs of food startups selling online, they mentioned that they were using the same strategy.The one downside to this strategy is that you can’t collect customers’ email addresses through Amazon - inhibiting your ability to retarget.InstagramWhile we’ve grown our Instagram account to over 10,000 followers, we’ve been using Instagram as a tool to partner with Korean restaurants and reach out to influencers we’d like to work with.We haven’t seen a significant amount of conversions from campaigns with Instagram influencers, however these partnerships have been successful in growing our following, driving traffic to our website, and providing creative assets for our e-mails, website, and ads.YouTubeWe’ve had success partnering with YouTube influencers, but it’s taken a lot of time, effort, and luck. When we first started cold e-mailing influencers, we didn’t get many responses.If you’ve ever had experience selling anything, you know it’s a numbers game and that was true here, but we really lucked out when Greg Mrvich, of Ballistic BBQ (230K+ subscibers), got back to us.He also resided in Southern California and was empathetic to our struggles as a newly minted startup. It also helped that Greg was a huge fan of Korean food. We sent him some samples of our sauce and the rest is history.He creates these amazing, mouth-watering videos featuring culinary BBQ masterpieces and we can’t thank him enough for his help!PartnershipsAlong with YouTube influencers, we’ve been able to partner with other companies, such as subscription boxes leveraging our success on Kickstarter, online sales, earned media, and prior relationships.We use past partnerships as credibility to fuel the next one giving other parties multiple reasons to collaborate with us. We are honest in our communications, prompt in our responses, and detailed in our work. We use every success as a stepping stone to reach up and find better opportunities.We’ve partnered with subscription boxes such as Bespoke Post and BBQ Box, and each partnership has led to increased website traffic and new customers.Our latest partnership for KPOP Sea Snacks was with women’s quarterly subscription box, FabFitFun, and Pinterest in their limited-edition, specially co-branded box called the P100, a box reflecting Pinterest’s top trends for 2018.Partnerships like these can help in multiple ways from generating direct sales, increasing brand exposure, to acquiring a new group of potential customers. We see large influxes of website visitors at the onset of announcements and steady traffic for the duration of a partnership.We are generally able to cater to these new audience by creating unique landing pages or offering special discounts only offered to them.So how did we source these kickass deals? Apart from what I mentioned above about using accomplishments to get one deal, and then using that deal to source another, it comes down to goodwill and building relationships. Here’s an example:Our Kickstarter success can be attributed to what we learned by reaching out to the founders of other successful campaigns. We paid that collaborative, sharing mentality forward by talking to anyone that reached out to us for Kickstarter advice or business advice in general.Months after helping one such person, that individual connected us to one of her friends, working at an amazing brand that just so happened to be looking for amazing Korean-inspired products. And voila! Relationships matter and have led to some of our biggest achievements.No matter how busy we are, I think we can all agree that we can spare 20 minutes out of a day to talk to someone or help someone out. Help other people out without expect anything in returnEmailLastly, a new initiative that we’ve been focused on is email marketing. Through a platform called Dojo Mojo, we’ve been able to partner with companies to run giveaway campaigns and through just three campaigns, we’ve been able to grow our e-mail list by over 500%.While email marketing has always been great way to keep in touch with our initial customer groups to drive repeat purchases, gathering new emails is essential to widening our top sales funnel and increasing revenues.There are so many different objectives a company can hit with e-mail marketing (e.g., web traffic, referrals, conversions, education, etc.). The greatest part of e-mail marketing is that it is extremely cost efficient and targeted – we don’t spend on advertising and we get prime placement in the mailbox of our would-be and existing customers.Specialty Retail StoresA specialty sauce distributor reached out to us after the completion of our Kickstarter campaign and we’ve been working with them to get our products into their network of specialty stores nationwide.These stores we’re placed in are generally independent grocers (think mom-and-pop shops), but our experience has taught us much about selling in retail as we look towards expanding distribution. It’s one thing to get into a retailer and another to ensure your products are selling in that retailer.Sell-thru in a store can depend on, but are not limited to the following: customer demographics, store location, product price points, promotions/discounts, and sampling. Our success in these stores have served as validation that we must expand our distribution in order to scale and take our company to the next level.How are you doing today and what does the future look like?Since September of last year, we’ve generated nearly $100,000 in revenue, primarily all online through our website and Amazon (about a 50/50 split in revenue by channel).We are currently in the middle of fundraising to expand our distribution outlets, develop new products, and hire new talent. Since February of this year, we’ve entered over 90 specialty stores throughout the nation and are now receiving interest from distributors and larger retail chains.We’re also partnering with restaurants and coffee shops, such as Everytable and The Hive in Los Angeles.As mentioned previously, e-mail marketing has been showing promising signs. That’s the name of the game for startups. It’s a bunch of testing and finding out what’s working and what’s not.We now have a list of over 10,000 subscribers. We’re constantly A/B testing variables such as day, time, content, subject line, and so on to improve our open and click rates.In product development, Chris is focused on launching 3-4 new variations of KPOP Sauce in the 4th quarter of this year. We’re also looking into developing 2-3 new flavors of KPOP Sea Snacks to launch at the beginning of 2019. It’s been exciting getting sneak peaks at the recipes in development and we can’t wait to share them with everyone!For e-commerce, we target a gross margin north of 33% - the higher the better. This is absolutely necessary if we plan on expanding distribution to physical stores. Online, we don’t get as many sales as we would if we were in multiple grocery stores, so an extra $0.75 per order, goes a long way.Secondly, our margins include shipping expenses that we incur as we provide free shipping for all our products (shipping is quite costly especially if you have heavy or bulky product!). Our online price for our products minus shipping expenses will generally set the suggested retail price (SRP) for our physical retailers.Traditionally, one could follow the 1/3 rule to expand distribution into physical retail stores. That is, 33% margin for you (the manufacturer), your distributor, and the end retailer.Today’s retail landscape is rapidly changing, and many distributors and retailers are requiring higher margins as they’re facing competition at an unprecedented level.While it’d be great to be able to do direct deals with retailers, until we have a suite of products or our own distribution network (hopefully one day), we must partner with distributors to scale.With the increase in distribution and launch of new products, our revenues are projected to grow quickly in the coming months and we’re working on ensuring that we’re operationally prepared.We also have a lot of plans for upcoming partnerships, content, and experiential marketing events. We’re not just talk. We’re out to prove we’re not your average food brand. We’re going to revolutionize the way people view and taste food in the consumer-packaged goods (CPG) space.Our vision is to be the premier Korean food company for America – that KPOP products be in every pantry across the nation. To get there, KPOP Foods will need to be the Red Bull of Korean food by bringing together mainstream culture, art, music, and food.Through starting the business, have you learned anything particularly helpful or advantageous?Cultivate a great teamIt’s tough to go about it alone. Find a partner and build a team. I think one thing that truly helps is finding a great co-founder to work with.I’m incredibly lucky to have Mike as my co-founder and there is absolutely no way in possible I could imagine KPOP Foods being where it is today without him. While we are both very different in so many ways, the one thing that we share is a strong work ethic.We push each other to continuing fighting and overcoming setbacks and obstacles and having someone there with you is a huge relief. There have been so many times where I was tied up and had to leave things off with Mike and knowing that he’ll take care of everything is paramount.Launch quicklySecondly, I think a really important concept, especially for when just starting out, is being comfortable with launching things quickly. Early on, it’s hard to get everything perfect and you have to become comfortable with things being launching that may not be 100% perfect or may not be what you had initially envisioned.If you’re constantly waiting for your product or service to be perfect, odds are by the time you’re completely satisfied with it, you’ve exhausted your resources and missed out on the timing of your opportunity. Fail quick, learn quick.ReflectLastly, I realize that at the early stages of building a company, this is very hard to do, but you should always try to find time to reflect on things to think of how you can improve or do something better.It’s very hard to find time to do this, but I think it’s very important for a number of reasons – you may realize that worrying about something wasn’t worth your time at all or didn’t have an impact on the business or you may find that if you had something slightly differently, there could have been a lot of new added value.This is also something good to do with your team as they’re also likely in the middle of many different things and receiving their feedback and points of view may help you down the road as well.What platform/tools do you use for your business?After researching the various platforms businesses use for e-commerce, we found that Shopify was the best choice due to its convenience in website design, product setup/integration, and fulfillment.We utilize the native shipping tools on Shopify that include discounted shipping labels. As a CPG company that deals with a lot of inventory, Shopify’s backend could adequately support. We’ve had no issues thus far.Within Shopify, we use the app, Shogun, for frontend design. For example, we can use it to change the layout of our landing pages or products pages, and even affect how our pages look on mobile vs. desktop.It took some time to master, but it’s pretty user-friendly and is much more affordable than hiring full-time web developers. I like their snippet function that allows us to save formatted designs that we can easily access and use at another time.We use Sumo, another Shopify app, to generate our pop-ups for e-mail lead capture. I like the app because it’s intuitive to use and easily allows us to run A/B tests to see what kind of offers, content, or copy language performs the best.We can run different pop-ups on specific pages, control when a visitor sees these forms, and what happens when a visitor submits his or her e-mail.Google Analytics (GA) is a must for e-commerce store owners. It’s free to use and comprehensively tracks nearly everything we need to know about our website visitors and the actions they take on site. These visitors are all potential customers. By identifying and optimizing their pathways, we can increase sales and conversions.For example, if our homepage has the highest bounce rate (percentage of visits in which a visitor leaves our website without browsing any other page) we know we can examine the source of the traffic or our homepage design/messaging to affect the bounce rate.Lowering the bounce rate means that visitors are spending more time on our website, which increases the likelihood of conversion. This is just one example of the myriad of uses of GA. If you’re interested in learning more, Google provides a lot of free online classes on GA. It is truly a powerful tool worth investing in.What have been the most influential books, podcasts, or other resources?One book that I really enjoyed was "Power to People: The Inside Story of AES and the Globalization of Electricity". This book focused on several topics, but the founders’ focus on culture and empowering employees to make decisions is something I hope to drive forward at KPOP Foods.I want to say that most of you reading this right now have already read "How to Win Friends & Influence People" by Dale Carnegie. But in the off chance, you haven’t, you should. It applies to every aspect of life, not just business.I’m amazed at how, even 80+ years since it was first written, the principles still apply. If a person would try to adhere to any of the principles mentioned in this book, it would positively impact his or her relationships with friends, colleagues, and significant others.Finally, we’d be remiss if we didn’t thank UCLA Anderson and the UCLA Anderson Venture Accelerator for all the support they’ve given us these past 18 months.They provided us a beautiful, collaborative working space to build our company, access to industry professionals and investors, and a chance to work alongside some amazing companies like Alcatera, Habit Nest, and Textpert just to name a few. These relationships have been invaluable and have helped us move rapidly while avoiding costly mistakes.Advice for other entrepreneurs who want to get started or are just starting out?Entrepreneurship is not for the faint hearted. You’ll need grit and passion – and a whole lot of it. Creating a successful business requires massive amounts of action, perseverance, and conviction.It’s not something you can build in one, two, or even three years. It’s a long-term battle filled with many sacrifices and tribulations.Pursuing the path of entrepreneurship will most likely be the most difficult thing you’ve ever done in your life.This isn’t to dissuade any of you. Because while starting your own business may be the most difficult feat you’ve ever attempted, stay true to your course, your dream, and it’ll also be your most rewarding accomplishment.Are you looking to hire for certain positions right now?Yes, we’re looking for a VP of Marketing or Marketing Associate to join our team full-time. The person would oversee paid marketing (Facebook, Amazon, and Google Ads), email marketing, social media, brand partnerships, website, and public relations.Additionally, this person would also have an opportunity to get involved in product design and content developmentWe are also always looking for interns interested in finance, accounting, data analytics, and marketing. If you’re interested in working in a startup or becoming an entrepreneur, it’s a great opportunity to get experience.It’s a fast-paced and challenging environment where you’ll learn tremendously and see the results of your actions on a daily basis.Where can we go to learn more?WebsiteFacebookInstagram[Email](mailto:yummy@kpopfoods.com)Amazon KPOP Foods Brand Page---Liked this story? I've done nearly 100 interviews with similar founders at StarterStory.com.

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Teachers Have Great Ideas. Here’s How to Turn Them into Reality.

As anyone who’s ever spent time in a classroom knows, teachers are constantly generating ideas and implementing them with their students. Naturally, schools are keen to surface these light bulbs so they can support them and increase their scope of impact. In some cases other teachers or schools may benefit from these small-scale brainstorms when they are applied to the big picture.

The challenge with this approach is doing it in a way that is not cumbersome and does not just add another task onto already-stretched teachers. For school leaders, it’s not so much about prescribing any particular innovation, but rather providing a space and opportunity for teachers to share ideas and develop them.

In looking at leaders spearheading innovation, Harvard Business Professor Linda A. Hill has noted that while “all were visionaries capable of creating a vision and inspiring others to pursue it, none considered this their primary role. Instead, they saw themselves as ‘social architects’, whose role was to shape the context. They created communities in which others were willing and able to innovate.”

So how are school systems providing this space for teachers? In all sorts of ways. Here’s how two of them are spurring teacher innovation through new policies and programs, which may serve as a roadmap for others.

Partnering in Georgia

In the case of Georgia’s Gwinnett County Public Schools, school leaders began by bringing in an external group to help the district build a mechanism to surface and develop their teachers’ ideas. The district just wrapped up their first year of a partnership with The Teachers Guild, which is a non-profit initiative of PLUSSED at Riverdale Country School and IDEO’s Design for Learning Studio.

If something wasn’t working, we would think about why it wasn’t working to see how the idea could be made better.

Babak Mostaghimi

Babak Mostaghimi, the executive director of innovation and program improvement, gathered a team to help answer a central question: How, in a district of 12,000 teachers, could they tap into these minds and empower teacher voice to fundamentally redesign student learning experiences?

Gwinnett was one of four districts to form a chapter with The Teachers Guild. This year, they started with two middle schools that fed into two high schools and intentionally chose schools that were representative of the county’s student population. Each school had design team leaders selected by principals who expressed interest in the process. These leaders received training directly from the Guild around the design thinking process and brought back this information to their schools.

School design teams started off throwing out ideas, and encouraged teachers to contribute. These 300 ideas were then narrowed down to 65, which were posted on the Teachers Guild’s online platform. This got further whittled down to 12 that showed an initial prototype and nine ideas were presented at an end-of-year showcase. “All of the ideas really evolved because of teachers taking charge, letting their ideas blossom and not saying no,” Mostaghimi said.

As teams dove into ideas, they quickly realized that something that sounded interesting on paper did not always play out the way it was intended during the testing phase. “We were pulling in ideas from teachers and having a rigorous process where teachers were vetting their ideas,” Mostaghimi explains. “Teachers naturally moved away from ideas that weren’t working.” No one from The Guild told teachers whether ideas were good or bad. Rather, Mostaghimi says teachers learned to cast a critical eye toward which pilots were working and which weren’t. “If something wasn’t working, we would think about why it wasn’t working to see how the idea could be made better.”

The ideas that made it to the final presentation were a diverse bunch. One group looked at leveraging virtual reality so students could go on virtual field trips to faraway places like the pyramids of Egypt or the Taj Mahal or see a beating heart from multiple perspective. Other groups looked at flexible scheduling and saw noticeable increases in student confidence in learning independently on a digital platform. Another team realized that, based on surveys, middle school students were not fully informed of the various programs and pathways offered to them in high school—and so piloted a program to build awareness. Some of these will continue to be prototyped while others are fully baked and slated for implementation.

Mostaghimi found that a big takeaway for the teams was the realization that most of the ideas required little to no funding. Of the final nine ideas, only two used extra funds. He also noted that it was great to see the increase in teacher engagement regardless of experience level. Veterans were re-energized through this process and less experienced teachers were given a leadership opportunity. The collaborative nature of the program also meant that while an idea that was proposed by one school may not have fit their context, it may get picked up by another school in Gwinnett County or the larger Teachers Guild community.

“Teachers led the process and put everything together. They led conversations with administrators in their own schools,” Mostaghimi said of the process. “We don’t need every single person to do this kind of work, but we do have a lot of people with lots of great ideas.”

Creating KIPPovators in Los Angeles

Charter school network KIPP LA Public Schools developed the KIPPovate mini-grant challenge to foster innovation by surfacing great ideas from their teachers. Teachers submit a brief interest form, which gets reviewed by a committee. A few are selected to submit a more detailed application to detail out budget, specific goals and the anticipated impact. Ideas have to be sponsored by the school leadership team. A committee composed of members of the KIPP LA School Success Team looks to make sure that the idea is innovative in the sense that it is a new idea and that it is scalable to impact a wide swath of students or teachers.

Selected teachers are invited to a pilot phase in which they receive up to $1,000 funding toward piloting their idea. As a follow up, these KIPPovators meet one-on-one with members of the innovation team every month or two to share successes and collaborate on overcoming roadblocks. Matthew Peskay, chief of innovation and technology, says that this in-person collaboration piece is critical because having people on the ground working with the teachers and really understanding the pilots allows them to get more targeted support.

Students in Kelly West's classroom used Chromebooks to make stop motion animation films, an idea developed through the KIPPovate program. (Source: Matthew Peskay)

At the end of the pilot, the teachers submit a reflection to share lessons learned and successes, which the KIPPovate team hopes to use to identify trends on successful projects. If a KIPPovator meets all expectations but the idea just did not work, they receive $500 in recognition for completing the pilot. If the pilot does have a strong impact, the idea is moved to the Accelerate stage where the school receives an additional $2,500 to spread the idea.

In the last five years, there have been 21 pilots ranging from robotics programs to flexible learning environments to a take-home library program, with an even split between those that are tech-driven and not.

Seventh-grade science teacher Kelly West ran a stop motion film festival using Chromebooks and found a lot of value in the program. “It shows that KIPP has an understanding that teachers are coming with different strengths, different experiences, and different passions they can share with students,” she says.

Peskay points to the proliferation of ideas at schools as the program’s success. One pilot centered around robotics has expanded to the point that a schoolwide competition is held twice a year and has become a major part of the culture of the school. He also points to smaller details like noticing the use of stability balls in nearly all classrooms after a teacher introduced them through a pilot.

Yet the program has gone through some iterations. They tried doing half-year cycles instead of a full-year pilot but Peskay advises schools to consider the longer schedule. “The pilot is not necessarily the teacher’s No. 1 priority because they have a lot on their plate,” he said. “To expect trustworthy outcomes in a short amount of time is a bad way to go forward. You’re looking for truthful data, not necessarily success.”

Teachers Have Great Ideas. Here’s How to Turn Them into Reality. published first on https://medium.com/@GetNewDLBusiness

[symbianosgames]

The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community. The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.

Long story short, we have tripled DAU and monthly revenues by launching Diggy’s Adventure on iOS and Android. We were spending 1 Million EUR a month on paid user acquisition during Global Launch. Cool, right? But why would you care? Because not every game in the Appstore is a hit. Diggy is our mobile hit, but in terms of numbers we are far from games like Pokemon Go or Clash Royale. Your game doesn’t have to be a hit to be profitable.

After successful global launch, Diggy’s Adventure made over 5 Million EUR in less than 3 months.

DIGGY’S ADVENTURE

Released in September 2016 on iOS

Released in October 2016 on Android

8 Million downloads

Diggy’s Adventure is our mobile game with a well written story that is full of plot twists as you progress through thousands of brain-teasers and beautiful locations such as Egypt, Scandinavia, China, or Atlantis. Diggy is not only a nimble tiny miner but also a hilarious character to spend some time with. Great adventure game meets puzzles. You can join the family of Diggy, Professor, Linda and Rusty on their journey to explore a world full of ancient civilizations and mysteries.

DEVELOPMENT AT PIXELFEDERATION

I know there should be some market research activities before prototyping. Honestly, we didn’t pay very much attention to research in the past. Truth be told, our mobile games are ported from the web, we were not investing in Market Research

Researching key players in your game’s category can give you some great insights into what your target audience values in a game. How are other apps/games named? Are they memorable? Which categories are they targeting? Which keywords are they ranking high for? An analysis could prove to be very useful in getting your game in front of the right audience.

The situation is different now. We recently opened Match 3 division and realized market research is crucial. You know, we are learning by doing. When we launched TrainStation back in 2015 our soft launch process wasn’t so good either, and look at where we are now.

SOFT LAUNCH

Thank you, Diggy, for explaining the simple definition of Soft launch. But why do we need to soft launch our game in the first place?

Lowering the risk of failure

Understanding our game performance

Understanding our audience

Collect feedback

Optimize FTUE

A/B test of tutorials

Test marketing channels

Test creative assets

LTV > CPI

Kill the game, if necessary

Detailed view on WHAT’S THE POINT OF A SOFT LAUNCH? will follow in the next blogpost.

DO’S & DONT’S of Soft launch

SOFT LAUNCH KPI’S

When it comes to creating a mobile game soft launch strategy, you should first have a clear understanding of your objectives. You should align objectives with KPIs before diving headfirst into a plan of action.

What did we do here with setup of KPI’s? We looked at numbers of our already-mobile-launched game Trainstation. We compared platforms and their performance. We saw relative uplift, which we included into the setup of Diggy’s Adventure KPI’s. We also did this with retention KPI’s, but I find monetization metrics more interesting.

ITERATIONS

Each build has a changelog, so we can get back to every change we made in the past. Also, we wanted to track which changes made the biggest change in metrics.

SOME SOFT LAUNCH FACTS

Duration:  6 months Platforms: Android, iOS Countries: PH, MX, CA, NL, AU, CZ, SK User Acquisition: 80 000 users Targeting: Female & Male, Age 25+, affinity

THE CREATIVE PART

In mobile games marketing, the quality of the creative has historically been less relevant. Developers used to be able to get away with a few screen grabs and maybe some gameplay videos that one of their ad partners made. This is also changing.

Creatives can be funny, dramatic and scary. They can stir emotions in your players and help them view your game as more than a disposable experience. We’ve seen that the best-performing creatives are the ones that can elicit a reaction from the viewer, even if it’s a little ridiculous. No matter what kind of creative you use for your game, development and testing has also become more important.

We never realized that until last year. We were struggling big time. CPI’s went up, conversion rates went down and we didn’t know what to do. We’ve reached out to our fb rep and this is how it looked like.

You know this situation, right? Six different issues and you get the same answer. After a couple of discussions our fb rep Ricardo invited us to their offices in Dublin for a Creative Hack. We realized that there is no need for changing the creative, but for changing our mindset and workflow!

Developers should consider working with both in-house artists and external creative firms to make a steady pipeline of static and video creatives for all of their marketing channels. You need to develop a creative cycle! Once you have a diverse array of creatives, you need to test them rigorously to see which ones best meet your key KPIs and increase install rates.

Okay, you may ask what does all of this have to do with Global launch of Diggy’s Adventure? Trust me, a LOT! Since May, our ad units are 100% video. This creative hack helped us to open our minds and think outside the box. We have developed a two week creative cycle and brainstormed the shit out of our heads. That’s how our global launch videos were made.  

[embedded content]

To grab attention within the first 3 seconds, we used an eye-catching headline that was clear and exciting even without sound. The video also included short questions, encouraging players to think. “Can you solve it?” was connected with engaging copy “There is no riddle that can’t be solved. Test your skills in Diggy’s Adventure”. “Play Game” call-to-action button directed people to the app stores where they could download the game.

APP STORE OPTIMIZATION

With over 2 million mobile apps in the major app stores, getting your app discovered is one of the biggest issues facing mobile app publishers today. ASO is the process of optimizing mobile apps to rank higher in an app store’s search results. The higher your app ranks in an app store’s search results, the more visible it is to potential customers. That increased visibility tends to translate into more traffic to your app’s page in the app store.

The goal of ASO is to drive more traffic to your app’s page in the app store, so searchers can take a specific action: downloading your game.

Also, the ASO process requires a crucial understanding of your target customer base, including the keywords your potential customers are using to find apps similar to yours. When you learn more about which keywords are being used, you will have a better understanding of the language of your potential customers – a crucial piece of any marketing plan – and you can home in on your keyword choices.

If you’re not using ASO to increase your app’s search ranking, you’re missing out on the largest discovery channel available to your app.

With hundreds of thousands of apps in each app store vying to rank above one another, the amazing reality is that the majority of publishers are not investing in app store optimization. So here’s our gift to you: ASO is your secret weapon.

Spend time every week improving your ASO and you will meaningfully impact your app’s ranking and overall success.

GLOBAL LAUNCH

FACEBOOK ONLY

We decided to devote our whole advertising budget for the launch of Diggy’s Adventure to Facebook. First, we have our own in-house team for managing Facebook ads. Second, we have great experience with Facebook ads comparing to other Ad networks. Also, with over 600 million gamers on Facebook and Instagram, you can grow faster by marketing to a global audience thanks to various options of targeting.

We started with interest targeting, but we also looked at our existing customer base and identified the customers who were most valuable in terms of activity and in-app payments. Then we used Lookalike Audiences for international markets to find more people like them in the areas where we wanted to introduce the game.

Next, we targeted these groups with video ad units across Facebook, Instagram and the Audience Network – entire Facebook family of apps and services.

To ensure we were targeting the right people, we created multiple audience segments (app event + demographic) using our own BI tool and Facebook Analytics. Then we created a Custom Audience from these segments and created further lookalike audiences for different countries.

The plan was to spend 150k EUR for the first month after global launch date. Then I realized it would be a missed opportunity to stick with this plan and we raised the budget to 1 Million EUR per month. Yep, 1 Million EUR monthly spent only on Facebook platform. Soon we recognized that’s not a healthy portfolio.

We had been working with ad networks in the past, but results (and also feelings) were mixed. There are tons of ad networks out there and we were probably working with the bad ones. Fortunately, now we have reports like Appflyer Performance Index or latest Singular Global ROI index so we can choose our partners wisely. We are finally starting to diversify our paid user acquisition channels and build partnerships.

FEATURING Apple & Google play

There were more than 70 000 games submitted to the iTunes App Store in the Q4 2016. Yes, you read that right: 70k games!

To get your app chosen as a feature, it’s helpful to know how apps get chosen as features. Because it’s not done by some complicated algorithm–they’re actually hand-picked. To better serve different countries, Apple actually has 155 app stores, each with a local editorial team.  Ehrenberg explained that, each week, the local app store editors determine the best–and most relevant–apps for their specific users. By having humans choose the apps, Apple ensures that the featured apps will be the ones most likely to appeal to local users.

Having Apple feature you on the App Store can make or break a mobile game, as it helps you stand out among a million competitors. But this is easier said than done.

We got featured by Apple once and by Google twice during global launch! Blogpost about how we pulled it off will follow.

Success? Yes, indeed!

After successful global launch, Diggy’s Adventure made over 5 Million EUR in less than 3 months. We basically tripled our revenue. I think I should mention that we monetize our players only with In-App purchases. There are no ads in Diggy at all. Well, it’s not completely true because we run rewarded video A/B test but only on 1/3 of our traffic. We wanted to be sure rewarded video doesn’t cannibalize in-app purchases.

After the mobile launch we set a new daily record during the Black Friday special offer to 180k EUR. There was a discussion about Black Friday because I found a couple of articles about the strength of Black Friday offers and realized this would be a missed opportunity. Diggy devs even added a new Black Box mechanic.

What I wanted to say is you should target specialized markets by incorporating regional festivals. Need to brush up on your world celebrations? Here’s a quick guide to popular holidays worldwide. Definitely worth it!

Metrics during Global launch

These numbers are the best that we were able to achieve during global launch.

Metrics 2-3 months after Global launch

This is how it looks like 2-3 months after launch.

Facebook

Ad networks

What went wrong?

In gaming not everything goes according to your wishes. That’s our story, too. This is not criticism, we all did our best. Of course we made mistakes, but we learned our lessons. Don’t be afraid to make mistakes and fail. And fail fast, as our CEO often says. It is hugely important to ensure that all the lessons from a failure will find their way into the next project. It’s these lessons that will make you and your next game better.

So yeah, this is how we did it. Lessons were learned (quite a few). Hopefully, we can benefit from all of these mistakes & lessons this year with our next mobile games in the pipeline.

What do you think about it? What should we improve?

[elizbethwolf]

All About Scribble Color Scanning Pen – Buy for Cheap

What Is The Scribble Pen?

Publicly known as ““revolutionary pen that draws in any color!”” the Scribble color scanning and print pen in short words is a very advanced pen that is capable to scan “any color in the world” from any surface and then copy/replicate that color for pen writing. Color scanning is also meant for digital uses as you can extract color code from the pen. This revolutionary pen has been calling the attention of all media for the last year, Scribble pen solves a lot of situations for practical home and industry uses.

During this article we will discuss what main uses for the Scribble Color Scanning Pen, how it works, provide you instructions and videos on how to use it, where to buy it for cheap and more!

Scribble Story Starts at KickStarter

Back in early 2011, a group of dreamers submitted a project for funding in favor of the Scribble prototype project, it was an instant global hit as people went crazy to support the creators of this incredible idea. It was promising then and still very promising after almost 10 years of its submission for budget support.

Unfortunately, the Scribble color scanning and printing pen project had to be canceled as it called the attention of the KickStarter team right away. They were concerned that this project was just promising fake future results on technology that actually didn’t exist at the time. So the Kickstarter team reached out to the creators of the budget claim project to see if they could provide some sort of proof or a provisional functional prototype.

With this prototype request by KickStarter, they could at least proof that the project was not only based on dreams but a real and actual object might be already in the works. But the team was not ready to show anything close to their dreams and this caused the project to be canceled from funding raising. Over $300,000 were raised within the first few hours of the project being published, all these were returned to the actual bidders after the Scribble project got canceled.

Funding Was Born

Later they responded that the team of KickStarter didn’t have to panic. A video with explanatory samples on how they are going to develop de Scribble project was going to be released soon. But instead, the Scribble team opted to just walk out of that KickStarter system. Instead, they created their own crowdfunding system far from the “arbitrary” specifications that blocked the funding in the first place. It didn’t have much trust by themselves as expected, so the team had to fall again into another funding source called “Tilt”.

Bidders see the product up for bidding for 3rd time, something is not looking clear here and the support falls to 2/3 of what the raised in the first campaign. Still, over $200,000 was more than enough to get the project running but another problem surged at this time. The fund sourcing team also requested more information about the project, same situation as before. Ended up canceling the project, again! A working 100% prototype was not possible to have in hand at that time as the technology needed to create it didn’t exist yet, the reason why they needed the funds.

Who said beginnings were easy? Funny thing is that other fund-raisers using the same application, haven’t found this difficulty even with less productive and accurate working prototypes.

Weird Bad Vibes Against Scribble Pen Capabilities and Prototype Tests

Once the first useful prototype was successfully made, a video was recorded to prove that the pen actually works and does exactly as promised before against all odds and probabilities. But something really weird happened, during the film of the video, some frames overlapped the video as if it was edited. ( Picture above this paragraph shows the difference ) Causing a mass doubt thru the public thinking that the video could just be a fake. This hurt the trust the Scribble team had and it just got worse after Reddit took the topic as well. We all know Reddit, one of the biggest threat and conversational forum in the world, people love it to discuss topics on this site.

This evolved to a crowd of people investigating if the fact that a pen-like this was possible, or even a prototype was made that the story went on and on. Now people moved investigation among bloggers and article writers about the topic. Even an interview was found as a fake too, as the person “interviewed” didn’t actually exist. This is a known method for just fast online promotion but, didn’t work so well for the scribble team as it was looking really bad. As the investigation continued, these people discovered who was the “real person” behind all of these crowdfunding projects and it was not the company founders or owners. As no information was found locally or within any tech forum in the area where they supposedly lived. Only information about Scribble founders was only found on same Scribble website as if they didn’t exist at all.

The Research Goes On

The research kept on going looking out for companies registered within the United States for the last 2 years with anything similar to a pen within the company title, nothing was found. So if they were running this company under personal liability, any promised not accomplished could be sued against funding owner personal assets. All these looked really weird at that time. The only way to take this project out to the public was to fabricate a few Scribble pens as a prototype and send them to the main influencers in the media for them to try it out and speak for the product.

Gaining the Trust of The Influencers

Some of the top influencers signed in for a sample prototype so they could be the first in the world to try such a new technology. But continuous emails from Scribble team saying that there are delays and having difficulties to complete the prototypes so they couldn’t deliver until after a few months. These bloggers were publishing every step of the way and it was looking really bad for the eyes of the crowdfunding prospects at that time.

At this point, they were trying to sell the prototypes with the promise of getting them after a year of your order. By that time in 2016, the company was looking like a scam proposition and everybody turned away their support to the cause.

The story goes on and on but for the most part, we just wanted to give you a feel and look at how new and impressive technology has so many drawbacks in the beginning before it gets to the store for you to buy for a very cheap price.

The History Behind The Scribble Pen Technology

The Scribble team declared a 2 years intense design and technology path to get the pen to its final shape as we see it today. A lot of changes to the mechanism and the design of the pen were made as they needed it to be ready for home and commercial. At the same time, they also needed to make sure it will work free of defects. Knowing it is also going to be used for home applications, the size of the Scribble product had to be small. A small scanner and printer that could fit in your hand? A lot of innovations and new technology had to be invented to get this done with all the features it carries and the small size it has.

After the few first prototypes were made, the next challenge was to make it “bulletproof”. Remember the small piece of technology like this comes with a lot of internal, small and sensitive parts spooled very tight together. Even a small drop to the floor could be devastating if extra measures are not taken into count for the final production of the Scribble pen.

Thanks to the Scribble team, innovations never seen before were made possible for the color reproducing industry. Many of this new technology could improve the quality, size, speed, and cost of all of the future equipment with similar functionality.

How They Make It All Possible And SO SMALL

We figure you might still be curious about how they got all these functions together within a very little but resistant and functional tool. So here are some facts on the science behind the tech and how this device get it did and don’t expect us to say its just magic (LOL). Here are some specifications as established on their official website:

Scribble Stylus Pen

CompatibilityiOS 7+, Android 4.0+ConnectivityBluetooth, USBBattery Life15 hoursColor SensorRGB SensorTipSoft rubber tips includedDimension169 x 14.33mm (6.65 x 0.56 in.)

What Can The Scribble Pen Do?

The pen has so many technology parts in it, that once you start to describe it, you might be thinking, HOW THEY FIT ALL THESE IN A LITTLE PEN? But yes, the pen carries a small eye sensor to capture the color in an object near it. It is very small and easy to clean. The eye/sensor captures the color in an RGB format and converts the color into a popular color palette code for easy replication. Simply point the pen into the direction of anything you need the color replicated, and hit the button. A little stripe around the sensor will light up with the tone of the new color being copied, save the color to then write with it or just for later use and sync it to your cellphone or device, Isn’t that cool?

How to Re-fill Ink?

Offered in their website and almost any used website store over the internet, you can find the “Refillable Ink Cartridge”, in their own words: Scribble’s ink cartridge connects to a mixer and dispenser that exactly recreates the color you have scanned. Each cartridge comes with 30 miles of ink, and new cartridges cost less than $10!… I believe they have said it all. Looks really simple to use and to install.

Drawing Process

For your convenience, the scribble pen came with 3 drawing tips for different textures and feel. This allows you to express yourself with a different character, maybe thinner may be bolder. Gives you the will of choosing which size tip you need in case you are writing or drawing.

Do They Offer Guarantee?

The bad part is that the pen is actually NOT STILL AVAILABLE after so many years. We are not sure if this is a scam company or what. But we did a little research and found the competence that is already building and selling samples of these sort of pens and you could buy one right now with no waiting lines and no possibilities of being scammed.

Where to Buy a Similar Pen for Cheap?

The best choice is to look at Amazon and eBay for similar pens that are already available to the public. We ran a little search for eBay and found a very cheap $25 scribble-like pen available from China. (Screenshot Below). It looks very futuristic and is also sold with an extended guarantee so you won’t be scammed as advice earlier. Also, no need to pay almost $250 for a pen that doesn’t even exist yet as seen on Scribble website.

buy-cheap-scribble-like-pen

Unfortunately, Amazon doesn’t carry any type of similar pens as we ran a search there too for possible prototypes or new products. Stick with eBay if you want to give this a test run.

 Source:

Futurism.com

eBay

Scribblepen.com

ChimiPrinting-019

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