New Stuff Sunday 2
Maybe this will be a long running thing, here we are on Sunday again and I'm giving forum goers a new feature. I've removed the advert on the main forum page and replaced it with a list of the latest ratings from across the forum.
It's called Rating History and it's live right now!
Notes, now with live notifications!
Notes were introduced around New Years, they have been subject to an overhaul recently and now all registered players have been included in this open beta testing the new features such as live notifications, hiding and basic sorting.
How do I send a note?
If you already have friends, it's bleeding easy. Just press your name in the navigation bar, mine looks like this:
Once your panel has loaded, just press notes
Who is the note for? Start typing one of your friends, we'll fill in the rest. Pressing enter adds them to the list, keep typing, you can send a note to as many friends as you want (if you're sending spam, you might find you suddenly have no friends, just a warning to those would-be spammers out there)
Fill in your message and press "Send." Notes are a great way to extend your friendships with players to xbox or instant messaging with information you don't want to share with everyone on the forums. It's advisable not to share passwords or stuff like that, because it's still the internet and not everyone is who they say they are.
When you receive a note you will see a notification in the navigation bar, it will look like this. Just press it and you will see a list of all your new notes!
Flash 10.1 Beta 3 Available!
If you're running a netbook, you should get this version of the new 10.1 flash player because it enables hardware acceleration on the piddly gpu's that ship with most netbooks.
It means, 1080p flash video and ... playing games at a higher frame-rate.
New Stuff Sunday
Hey-o! You're probably enjoying some Sunday internet gaming, feeding your mum pancakes or spending some quality time with those people who you love-a-lot.
Sunday, lovely Sunday. We made some updates to Johnny Two Shoes to make your weekend a little bit more awesome.
First up, you'll see a slightly re-designed game page to fit the new design. It's easy to see, just check out any games and force your eyes towards the game title.
Next, we want you all to see when we post non-featured blog stuff, so we made an icon that shows the latest post next to the blog link on the homepage and in the forum! So now it's easier to leave a comment and know what's going on.
In addition to all that lovely new stuff, we have added hearts to hip-hap, now when a player hearts a game it will be added to the hip-hap queue! Hopefully it means more friends and another way to see what's going on.
Hip-Hap knows what's going down
Hip-hap was in beta a while back, it absolutely kained our servers because it wasn't optimised for the amount of players that loved to sit and watch it roll around, so we had to disable it while we worked out the kinks.
I'm happy to say that this evening we got it running just how we wanted so now it's back! Only for registered players, another reason to get on-board the good ship Johnny Two Shoes.
Learning Exclusivity
High Speed Chase 2 is fresh out of development and it's live for everyone to play, on this site and on a ton of other sites. But what's different about a player out there on the internet and a registered player at Johnny Two Shoes?
Before we launched High Speed Chase 2 we had a number of ideas for how we could reward players for being part of the community, it started a very long time ago when all of our games were released exclusively to Johnny Two Shoes, a lot of them remain that way today, most recently Banana Dash World 4 was released as an exclusive.
We realised to build a proper community we need to integrate feedback and player interaction but we also need to make the experience at Johnny Two Shoes unique. At first that was comments on games, but that was pretty basic (and not very unique) so we re-designed the entire site from scratch with the community at the core. Johnny Two Shoes 2.0 launched almost 2 years ago — we had medals, high-scores, player accounts, profile pages and a blog.
Things have changed since then, but it's been more of an evolution of that basic idea and an evolution of our design. We did have to start make games with other companies because we simply ran out of money — it was a hard decision to make and it lead to about 18 months of incredibly hard work, the worst part was that we were incredibly distant from the community during that time.
In October 2009 we started to see the light at the end of the tunnel, we were coming to a period when we could re-think what the community meant and how we would release our new games. We gave you Banana Dash World 4 as an exclusive, something we were very proud to do! We even tried throwing in a bonus level to see if it changed the reaction to the release.
The positive feedback we got from that bonus level set off a chain reaction with us. We worked out so many different ways to engage with the community and ways to boost the size of the community — we had High Speed Chase 2 half finished collecting dust so we busted open the files and tried to apply some of those ideas to:
- Promote High Speed Chase on the iPhone
- Engage new players
- Encourage player registration at Johnny Two Shoes
- Reward the existing community
So this is where we are now, a new blend on an existing mentality — another way to reward the community and a new way to drive new player registrations. As I write this, we're having a soaring number of new registrations when High Speed Chase 2 has been in the wild for around 24 hours.
So, what does this mean for the future of Johnny Two Shoes? You can bet that it means more community features, new ways to interact with each other (stuff you won't have seen anywhere else before) and a ton of new experiments that you can all get involved with.
This is an exciting time to be part of Johnny Two Shoes. We want to say thanks for sticking around and we're really looking forward to the rest of 2010 with you all!
Want to be a SPY?
This has just come in from an ex-MI6 agent, we're not sure exactly what he's trying to get across in that get-up but he certainly likes a little game called High Speed Chase 2.
You know, it's on iPhone and will be on the web in a few hours, stay tuned on our twitter.
High Speed Chase 2 Beta
My good friends of Johnny Two Shoes, the much anticipated release of High Speed Chase 2 is nearing. The heat of this release is pretty darn hot, so roll-up roll-up, leave a comment to be considered for a beta invite.
Please note, we don't invite everybody to the beta, but if you don't try, you'll never know. We will start the beta small and grow and grow until it's bursting onto the web.
Tell your friends and your friends friends. Good luck.
Notes in Beta
Now available for everyone to try out now is the new notes feature, it's still finding its feet in terms of usefulness but it's on its way to becoming a new way to communicate privately among the community.
To use the notes feature, make sure you've validated your email address and you will then see a "Notes" icon in the user panel. Type a name of one of your beloved friends in the recipient box and it will fill the rest in for you. Ready to send? Hit Send Note and shazam, it's in your note stream.
Please bear in mind that it's a beta and submit any madness you come across to the appropriate forum page.
Consider this a little Christmas/New Year gift from us. Send a note now!
Spaceman Stickers
Finally, after much waiting the honourable spaceman (and all his pals) have arrived today! It's been a lot of fun making spaceman our iconic logo so far and now he has a physical place on laptops, street lamps, underground carriages, pool tables, bus stops and lockers.
Sorry for the fluff, the stickers have little teeny pieces of paper stuck to them where they were die-cut. I just threw them on the scanner and hit GO!