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.

Brian Gossett’s mixes are regularly being played over the speakers up here in the Seattle office for quite some time so I wanted to take this opportunity to post one. To introduce this mix let me just say that it is a fairly dour and chilly compilation intended to capture the essence of the months of November and December. The artwork—always nicely done—is a clear reflection of the music.

This mix was contributed to The Mixtape Club which invites artists, musicians, and all around music lovers to make 10 song mixes. The mixes live on their website for about a month so be sure to catch them.

Cold Wind Blowing in the Witching Hour

One of the services we provide here at BKWLD is producing brand new sites for our clients. One of the difficult things about a brand new site is getting the word out about it. I’m mainly a developer here, so I thought it might be a cool exercise to research more about SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and put it into practice on a new site we’ve built for our new product, Elastic.

About Elastic

Many of our clients are in the “Outdoor Sports” category. Elastic is a software tool that ties together retail dealers to the sales representatives of our clients so dealers can easily order product for their stores directly from our clients. Currently, the market consists of paper based order forms, catalogs, and phone calls for inventory checking. Some of the bigger players in the industry have their own custom software solutions for this, like Trek or Burton, but they can be a little unwieldy and they only work for the one brand. Other competitors in this space force clients to adhere to their limitations and conventions. We recognized an opportunity here, so Elastic was created.

Elastic is based on Adobe Air technology, so the software runs on the desktop (Mac or PC), but  can also run in an offline mode. We designed it this way because typically sales reps would have the software loaded up on their laptop and bring it to the dealers directly. WiFi isn’t exactly pervasive yet in these environments, so always having an Internet connection is not an option. Sales Reps also travel a lot, so not relying on the Internet directly keeps them productive on the ground or in the air. Once the sales rep reconnects their laptop to the Internet, orders are placed and inventory totals are synced.

After the break we’ll get into it!

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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

Recently, a port of OpenCV, a library of object detection functions, was created for AS3 which has sparked a lot of interest and creativity in the flash and flex community. Stemming from this came facial recognition for AS3.

It is often difficult to find useful applications for these new technologies. Luckily, BKWLD was recently approached by .net magazine and was asked to write 2 articles. Jeff Toll, who’s article can be seen in this month’s issue, worked with me to come up with a design for a facial recognition application that will be featured in an upcoming issue of .net magazine. Together we came up with an idea for a virtual window, where the users can essentially fly through a 3D flickr gallery.

For the true experience you can visit the following link (you must have a web cam): http://bkwld.com/headtracking/. If you do not have a web cam, I have uploaded a demo video onto Vimeo at the following link: http://vimeo.com/7092048.

Here is the source if your feeling adventurous.
HeadTracking.zip

There are a couple things to note about the source code. First, this was developed using flex, so if you want use it in flash you will have to set HeadTracking.as as your document class. Second, I did not leave my Flickr API key in the source for obvious reasons. So, you will have to apply for a Flickr API key if you don’t already have one and enter it in the init function of the HeadTracking.as class file where it says “Enter your API key here”. If you find any errors in the source code be sure to yell at me in comments.

The following resources were used:
http://www.squidder.com/2009/02/26/realtime-face-detection-in-flash/
http://www.quasimondo.com/archives/000687.php
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jd3-eiid-Uw