BKWLD has successfully had two – but not self-sufficient – offices for about 7 years. When Robert went to Seattle to open our second office out of his bedroom, we always knew it would be our main development hub due to Seattle’s inclination towards tech, while Sacramento would stay focused on design, production and management. The lines have since been blurred, and each office is much more talent varied, but the fact remains that working as one, finely tuned Frankenstein of interactive is crucial to our success, and inter-office communication needed to be second nature.

Here’s some thoughts on how we successfully keep morale high, the work awesome and use our two locations to our advantage when working with out of town clients and agencies.

“Work” based Pros
Having two drastically different locations has lots of merits. Having experience with what it’s like to work across borders internally is good practice for the ‘real world.’ Not having as many great local opportunities for work as we’d like, but loving the lifestyles that Sacramento/Seattle afford us, we’re able to easily work with out of town locations like LA, NYC, Denver etc. because we constantly work with people hundreds of miles apart – each other.

We know all of the tricks and tools to make working ‘remote’ efficient:

• iChat/Adium/Aim etc. – a constant barrage of conversation, sometimes bordering on stream of conscious, but the lifeblood of BKWLD
• Skype/video chats – for when we need some face time
• A weekly status meeting between both offices where we catch up on all projects, housekeeping stuff, etc.
• WebEx/Gotomeeting – for walking clients through CMS trainings, creative presentations, alpha builds of sites
• Basecamp – the best way we’ve found to house all files, pertinent messages, client feedback etc. It’s the nucleus between our offices and a client.
• JIRA – for testing and QA of a site, we’re having great results with JIRA and it’s bug reporting and classifications
• www.supportdetails.com – no more “what browser and version of flash are you running?” it’s the perfect way to find out the client’s boss is still running IE6 and Flash 5.

In an economic climate where a traditional agency in LA/NYC/London wants to test out a digital shop in a new location, since we have working remote on lockdown, it’s an easy sell to an out-of-towner why they shouldn’t be worried one bit to use a non-local agency. In fact, I have some clients who I just adore, and have actually never met in real life.

Furthermore, the pros of having multiple offices from a ‘business’ perspective are pretty obvious – multiple markets for talent, multiple markets for new business and just the perceived value of having multiple offices. Office-wise we keep morale high by having interoffice get togethers a couple times a year, and having a handful of internal ‘mailing lists’ that serve almost like forums. For everything from ‘check out this awesome website/article’ to video game reviews to funny viral videos, the inner office banter is always going on.

“Work” based Cons
It’s certainly not all rainbows and cupcakes, there are some things that aren’t wonderful about working with clients and coworkers across the country.

Some people are more visual, and just NEED face time to connect, to be held accountable, etc. It’s pretty easy to be a ‘telephone tough guy’ or hide behind emails, when just going out to lunch or grabbing a drink in person could have helped solve an easy problem. We always have a face-to-face kickoff and launch meeting with clients, but during the middle, some clients might need more attention, and a quick flight isn’t always an option. And sometimes a client wants someone local, no matter what.

Another con is something I call “Island Syndrome.” Suppose a project is being managed and designed in Sacramento, but only ONE person in Seattle is developing on it. It can be easy for this Seattleite to feel isolated and alone on a project, since no one in their direct vicinity is working on it or talking about it in passing conversation. We try hard to not let this occur from a resource standpoint, and the nature of our offices tend that people always want to know what everyone is working on, but it can still occur. Additionally, there’s nothing like some “designer-developer-one-on-one” when it comes to hashing out whether a design is possible, whether an idea is too big or just arguing whether or not flash is dead (which of course it isn’t).\

Lastly, sometimes we get “Sacramento? Why would anyone want to live there?” We shouldn’t be so quick to forget it is the capital of the greatest state in the world! It takes little explanation to prove why we love this quality of life, it’s proximity to Lake Tahoe and San Francisco, etc. But other people might want the gloss and glitz of a NYC or LA agency.

Overall, it’s more rare these days to find a successful company with just one office – it just makes sense to have a bicoastal presence. I think what makes BKWLD unique is our adherence to the west coast, with offices not in the largest of markets, and still finding ourselves playing successfully with the big guys nationwide. To this success I attribute everyone’s adherence to staying nimble, staying connected and staying on top of our projects, clients and co-workers.

Brace yourself – a lot of the people at BKWLD play and love video games. I know, shocker right? From PC to consoles, to MMOs to handhelds, like most interactive shops and people of our age group, we all play and love games. So it’s no surprise that we enjoy making online/web games, whether as full fledged mini-sites, or in banner ads.

Recently we were interviewed by .net Magazine and one of the questions was what sort of things we felt made an online/web game successful. I enjoyed the question, and thought I would expand on it a bit in a blog about what Robert and I shared with them.

We basically boiled it down to four points we felt made for fun and success.

1. Competition & Recognition
If there’s one thing Twitter, Facebook and frankly, this blog proves, it’s that people love attention. Even while I am typing this, I am hoping you are enjoying reading this! So it’s not a surprise that people love to see their name at the top of a scoreboard, or to blast on their ‘wall’ that they just gained a level in Farmville. A game that doesn’t allow someone to ‘tell a friend’ about their score and challenge that friend to beat them is missing out.

2. Variables
I remember about 4 years ago we made a game for the California Tourism Committee that had you skiing against Governor Schwarzenegger down a mountain. Almost immediately, every high score on the board was “14 seconds”, because once you figured out the best path, that was the absolute best score you could get. Not very fun.

So by adding in some crazy score multipliers or jackpots, and things that might only show up in 1 out of every 100 games, you’re easily injecting not only variability, but also giving players a reason to keep trying.

Additionally, throwing in ‘bad’ items like point subtractions also helps make the game not about just trying to gobble up every item on the screen, but gets a little strategy into play.

3. Incentives
This is probably the most obvious of them all, but when someone is playing for an iPod/Corvette/cheeseburger, they are going to play. And play. And play. And tell their grandma to play too.

I think giving stuff away should be two pronged though – give something to the best, but also just give something randomly. In other words, you can give the Corvette to the person with the highest score, but also have 2nd and 3rd place prizes, and even a ‘boobie prize’ where any person who plays, has a chance to win that cheeseburger.

4. Keep it simple stupid
There’s a time and a place for an 80 hour epic gaming adventure. And that place is certainly not in a 300 x 250 banner on yahoo.com. If ever there was a time for a game to be ‘pick up and play’ it’s when it’s a banner or a minisite game. I think a good rule of thumb is if you need more than one page of instructions, it’s going to be too complicated for a ‘casual gamer’ and not complicated enough for a ‘hardcore gamer’.

Overall, there’s plenty of examples however where a game shines in just ONE of these categories, and that’s enough to keep people playing. But if you try to intertwine all of these into your next game (and let’s not forget about the actual ‘design’ of the game) you should have a winner on your hands.

We love making games, and for a while we always had at least one in development.  The demand has waned in the past year as companies focused on more direct kinds of marketing.  Here’s hoping we get more excuses opportunities to make games in the new year!

PS – here’s some of my faves we’ve done over the years.

• http://funnevergrowsold.com/game/
• http://www.whodouwant2b.com/game/
• http://yourcowtown.com/game/index.htm
• http://bkwld.com/work/indiana-jones-the-staff-of-kings
• http://www.firstbank.bkwlddev.com/728×315.php

I’m not sure if it was Demetre’s last blog post or the deafening crush of hearing “Twitter” come from every web, marketing, entertainment etc. person for the last few months, but it’s abundantly clear that Twitter is not going anywhere, and that’s a good thing.

Not to recant on my previous post regarding Twitter’s penetration – and after re-reading it, I realized that I sounded as if “your mom having a twitter” was a bad thing. Quite the contrary, it’s a fabulous thing for the web and for my industry. For at it’s most basic level, anything that keeps people using and talking about the internet is good for interactive shops.

That’s why I was especially stoked to see this New York Times article talking about how small businesses are using Twitter to get their name out there and connect with other customers and businesses.

One quote I found particularly poignant was the following from Anamitra Banerji, who manages commercial products at Twitter:

“We’re finding the emotional distance between businesses and their customers is shortening quite a bit.”

I think this is the real value in Twitter – immediacy & intimacy. Whether it’s breaking news spreading like wildfire through the “Twitterverse” (please slap me for using that term) like Michael Jackson’s death, or an impromptu Dave Chappelle appearance turning into a gathering of thousands of people, to much smaller scale things like that New York city street vendor broadcasting his location and menu items for that day, there’s nothing fresher on the web than a tweet. Read the rest of this entry »

Seems every Tom, Dick and Harry these days is talking about and hawking their Twitter. I’m trying to figure out when I started Tweeting – searched my email and found a message from Eddie, dated March 11th, 2007 simply saying “http://twitter.com”.

I’m thinking then I’ve been tweeting for over two years, and to say the technology, support and people using it has changed drastically is an understatement, but I’ve been using it the exact same way from day one. Here’s an example of both of these concepts. I used the site http://myfirsttweet.com to find my very first tweet (there’s a friggin’ cottage industry of these kinds of site):

danthebeast: Breaking this twitter cherry like so many sunflower seeds. 2007-04-12 22:38:00

Read the rest of this entry »

Via Kottke I just skimmed an interesting article about the sort of test subjects that 3D artists use when creating their work (see the article here if you’re interested: http://www.artfagcity.com/2008/07/28/img-mgmt-20-archetypes/).

It made me think about the sort of FPO (which stands for “for placement only“) images and text that Buk uses in our projects. Of course there’s Lorem Ipsum, which I’ve been grabbing from Lipsum.com now for years. I take for granted that the majority of people (marketing people even) have no clue what Lorem Ipsum is, and can’t help but chuckle a little bit when they ask me “site looks great, but what’s the deal with all of that weird greek text?”

But where we get to have a little bit of fun is regarding FPO videos and graphics. It’s rare when a job is designed with the final assets; there’s always photo/video shoots to be produced, final logos to be delivered etc. And where we really get to flex our “FPO chops” is when populating a client’s new site’s CMS with test content.

So to that end, I am proud to show you some of our developers and designers “Island of Misfit Content” of sorts that we use to populate our sites and CMSs, most of which never see the light of day. (Note: some of the more scurrilous and NSFW images will remain locked deep within the http://locahost vaults of our more devious devs; we can’t put everything on front street!).

Read the rest of this entry »

Hey internet folks who read our little blog (thanks btw).

I’m sort of old school I guess when it comes to checking blog updates on my favorite sites, I don’t use RSS.

Rather, I use “Open in Tabs” on a folder called “Fun Stuff” in Safari’s Favorites toolbar. How 2003, right?

I intended this post to be more about how the lack of updates here has been because we are all so busy on some amazing projects for Dragon, Microsoft, Red Ledge, 2K and more, and not about my silly Favorites situation. We’re doing some amazing work and will be posting it soon. Hold on to your internet hats, we have some bangers coming out!

Ok, so now that’s out of the way, back to my digression!

So when I click “Open in Tabs”, I normally then go back to working, and let the 30 or so websites open up and make for one huge-assed tabbed window. It’s sort of like popping cookies in the oven…and then DING, my websites are ready!

I then go through each site (http://www.achewood.com has been my first tab for years), read what’s new and more often then not, just quickly hit Command+W and move on to the next one. I check out the usual stuff from Google News, Wired, Kotaku, Kottke, Penny Arcade, FWA, etc. including Buk’s own blog, on which I saw Mark’s old-ish post about Kill Start. And that’s what made me write this weird post, thinking that we needed some fresh content (the definition of content, used pretty loosely if you’ve made it this far in my post).

Lastly, I don’t use RSS because of, believe it or not, banner ads! I like to look at them, see what’s new, what’s cool. I owe it to my clients and my industry to see what’s out there, and RSS doesn’t deliver that.

What are your browsing habits? –DAN

Once again we descended (or maybe ascended) upon Tahoe for our annual retreat. We had a monster four-story house with a pool table, ping pong table, “sauna”, etc. It was bittersweet, for if we continue to grow as we are, this might be the last time the entire Seattle and Sac crews can become as one, like a web designing Voltron.

We rocked out, worked hard, snowboarded, gambled, drank, ate and were quite merry. In lieu of a slideshow, I thought I would show some photos with my own commentary. The first are from the Sac office before we embarked.

Mark, Robert and Garrett talking about Ground Control.

Ryan, Josh and Matt probably talking about nothing important.

Vics, Koa and Max in the ‘waiting room’.

Greg doing some shit.

ML on the case. Project, managed.

Greghog Day, popping up in that ass.

The super group BKWLD

It’s not often that we get to direct and shoot photos and videos, so we really sunk our teeth into a fun project with did in conjunction with Runyon, Saltzman and Einhorn out of Sacramento. The project was a website for the California Department of Education, State of California & California Community Colleges (quite a mouthful).

The site is about showing the amazing pathways and opportunities available to students, who might not realize they can ‘profit from their passion’ by going to a California Community College.
In order to harness this idea, Jeff came up with a great design that didn’t feel ‘corporate’ or ’state-y’, to help resonate with the target. We wanted to give the feeling that it was made for students, by students.

We also included testimonials from some real graduates and students of the CA Community College system, to help reinforce the story even more. Greg, Jeff, Josh and I shot the videos in our own office, to give it a less polished and more grassroots feel.

Here’s a few photos from the shoot and of Jeff busting some Photoshop madness.

Been too long since my last post! Which is pretty indicative of the amount of work and traveling myself and fellow Buk-caneers have been doing.

Last month, Josh and I had the opportunity to go to the Outdoor Retailer Show in lovely Salt Lake City, Utah. We got to hang out with one of our favorite clients, Kelty, as well as meet and greet just about every other outdoor company in the world. From Marmot, to Northface, to Solomon, to Oakley, to Helly Hansen, etc. Other than the usual “we make websites that melt faces” talks, we were showing off our Visual Merchandising Tool (which is the cat’s ass, trust me. Don’t trust me? Email us about it.)

Here’s a couple photos of Kelty’s booth:

There was tons of beer drinking at the booths; Josh rose to the challenge:

As did I, along with a boatload of swag from Kelty:

Been meaning to post this for days, just a little shot of our Buk Turkey Day party up in Sac.