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Hearts of Oak Promotional Website

Oh, this is easy. The island is there and the Albans too but please think about fake TODs and renders, the people dont have ingame later. For what you will use the screenshot and what time of day and angle of view you need?

EDIT: When you write "you need a level", did you need the island for CryEngine directly?
 
Don't know if here's the place for a suggestion like this, but here it is:
Currently I'm working on the official website design and the lack of content and renewability started to bother me. At the same time, there are tons of satellite pagelets with small amounts of different content.
My offer is: To make the official website the main and have-it-all hub for our advertising effort.
For one, we can make it as fancy as we want and finally build up the brand. Second, to get the recruits and get HoO known we'll need to be visible in search engines, thus all current roads should start leading to the dedicated site, instead of PA! where, honestly, not that much juicy info is visible for visitors. Third, all the content in one place will make us look more alive. Fourth, forum pages, gamers' sites etc. are for that local audience, not the random prawlers, and are awfully limited. I personally have bad experience with ModDB, because while playing modded games for 10 years, almost every time I looked for mods there, the good ones were either non-present or when found - had no sufficient info or wiki, outdated downloads, or around 1.5 screenshot, so every time I had to look in dedicated game's modding forums.. Also, both DB pages have awful cluttered interface, over which I prefer any forum, however amateurish it'd look. Then, having the website collect rss feeds from there, really limits how interesting news articles we can make. That is no tailored and contextually inserted pictures or videos.
I know some will respond with "yet another site to maintain", but let me propose to put those corpses that rott at the bottom of recruitment thread to some use. Every week we get someone that has no skills in game production but wants to "promote", "advertise" and "test":facepalm the game. So let's make those bodies punch in news articles etc. for now.

And finally, I have an idea for the "Team" sub-page in website. It'd contain short witty descriptions of senior developers with their photographs and a board of all the crewmen (above "provisional" level) within their departments. It'd shoot two deers: make HoO look more of a real deal with names and pictures, which makes me buy that it's not just a facade and people are proud of their work; and it'd give the prospective recruits the aspiration to make it into "despatches".
Thanks and let's discuss it.
EDIT: @Pieter Boelen , move the post to any thread you see fit for it. And then about ModDB, you obviously know it better so I won't argue to leave any of those sites to decay, but when we have official site up and running, It would have point to keep most information where we are able to put it how we wish. And not collect scraps from sites that can't properly display it (no media categories) and send it in a way we can't properly display it either (rss text feeds).
 
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Ashinokami said:
Don't know if here's the place for a suggestion like this, but here it is:
Currently I'm working on the official website design and the lack of content and renewability started to bother me. At the same time, there are tons of satellite pagelets with small amounts of different content.
My offer is: To make the official website the main and have-it-all hub for our advertising effort.
Click to expand...
You are absolutely right. That was indeed the whole point of there being a main HoO website. But that is clearly not working out just yet.
The only thing that is up-to-date is the Twitter feed on the side. :facepalm

Ashinokami said:
I personally have bad experience with ModDB, because while playing modded games for 10 years, almost every time I looked for mods there, the good ones were either non-present or when found - had no sufficient info or wiki, outdated downloads, or around 1.5 screenshot, so every time I had to look in dedicated game's modding forums.. Also, both DB pages have awful cluttered interface, over which I prefer any forum, however amateurish it'd look. Then, having the website collect rss feeds from there, really limits how interesting news articles we can make. That is no tailored and contextually inserted pictures or videos.
Click to expand...
The ModDB and IndieDB do have one major advantage: They have a huge, steady audience. So what we post there actually gets seen by people.
That doesn't happen for our own website, because many people would not know to look at it. Certainly not in the numbers that the other sites manage to attract.
So I do reckon that whatever we post, we should post it everywhere anyway. And add a link to www.heartsofoakgame.com for those who want more details.
With that reasoning, we might as well have the HoO game site copy the IndieDB content like it does now. However, we DO then need to keep the IndieDB up-to-date!

Have a look at our PotC ModDB Profile: http://www.moddb.com/mods/new-horizons . I don't think that is too bad.
It doesn't really work well as "information archive" because there are no categories to the screenshots and mainly just News Articles.
But for the purpose of keeping people up-to-date and attracting new interested members, it does work quite al-right.

Ashinokami said:
And finally, I have an idea for the "Team" sub-page in website. It'd contain short witty descriptions of senior developers with their photographs and a board of all the crewmen (above "provisional" level) within their departments. It'd shoot two deers: make HoO look more of a real deal with names and pictures, which makes me buy that it's not just a facade and people are proud of their work; and it'd give the prospective recruits the aspiration to make it into "despatches".
Click to expand...
I like that idea. Goes well together with my suggestion of having a "Credits List" in the new Development Trailer I am hoping for soon.
 
Thread moved to Promoting the Game.

Pieter Boelen said:
You are absolutely right. That was indeed the whole point of there being a main HoO website. But that is clearly not working out just yet.
The only thing that is up-to-date is the Twitter feed on the side. :facepalm
Click to expand...
Eh? The site does show all our latest articles and videos too, so what's not working?
As soon as I've got the first new progress article up, that will at least bring things more up-to-date.

I know we're not properly advertising it yet, since it's still a WIP, but we are slowly starting to post links to it now.
 
@Ashinokami, have you set up an account on the site yet? If so you can get access to the admin side and see that there is a 'team' page that is dynamic based on the membership of the site (including pics, bio, etc). Once you set up your account I can grant it admin rights and you can play with the setup and layout to your hearts content. The content I have it set to consume right now is very limited because we would have to have someone write those articles and publish them in multiples of places and right now we can barely get even one place updated (moddb) let along more than one.
 
Interesting, I didn't even realize there was a place to register an account there... I'm sure it's not my eyesight, the fonts just keep getting smaller! :wp
 
@Captain Murphy, just registered.
And articles, I bet it's not the most interesting job, but not that hard. We make one update a week, mostly thanks to Cpt. Murphy, so I imagine articles being of similar recipe:
1 video commentary (basically the same as Cpt. Murphy voiceover);
+ concise description of perfect system we are trying to achieve, along every different subtopic of commntary (the best filler text, can be all aspirations, 0 real work);
+ week's modeling news with a screenshot of latest finished or near finished asset;
So, wouldn't that fill 10 lines of text? 200-400 words would be enough not to look ridiculous on website layout..
@Pieter Boelen, I can give credit for New Horizons just for having working dowload links. I just noticed another stiff thing in ModDB - it's putting everything in articles, which looks counterintuitive if it serves as game wiki, as default sorting is by date and there's no branching hierarchy.
 
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Armada said:
Eh? The site does show all our latest articles and videos too, so what's not working?
As soon as I've got the first new progress article up, that will at least bring things more up-to-date.
Click to expand...
I meant mainly that the latest article is over a month old. That is soon to be addressed though.

Ashinokami said:
I just noticed another stiff thing in ModDB - it's putting everything in articles, which looks counterintuitive if it serves as game wiki, as default sorting is by date and there's no branching hierarchy.
Click to expand...
Very true. It is great for news, but not so great as an information source.
Would it be worthwhile to just use the actual Wiki for information purposes though?

Captain Murphy said:
@Ashinokami, have you set up an account on the site yet? If so you can get access to the admin side and see that there is a 'team' page that is dynamic based on the membership of the site (including pics, bio, etc). Once you set up your account I can grant it admin rights and you can play with the setup and layout to your hearts content. The content I have it set to consume right now is very limited because we would have to have someone write those articles and publish them in multiples of places and right now we can barely get even one place updated (moddb) let along more than one.
Click to expand...
Let me know if I can do anything to assist. I'm still around for now and would definitely like to see the site fully up and running soon. :doff
 
We've got a system in place for Coordinators to report progress to the Project Managers, and I'm currently working on the first weekly progress article which should include some interesting content.
 
I think along with some of the other things like the videos on the site we can add something like a weekly developer diary which will be able to show what type of progress was made weekly such as different, model, texture that have been made, quest stuff, etc. To sort of give people a one stop check for what has recently been done or worked on. We could also showcase some of the finished things when they come out separately if they seem interesting such as the finishing of a ship. Though it may be hard to figure out clearly what was actually done that week.
 
Was I not clear enough the first time? We do have a weekly progress article in the works to do pretty much everything you just said. :wp
 
Yeah sorry you were clear I read that and thought I would say some more specific things just as ideas.:shrug
 
Just wondering.... Is it possible to set up the Twitter feed on heartsofoakgame.com to show ONLY the content flagged with #HeartsOfOakGame?
While it is, of course, nice to have PotC: New Horizons and other piratey/historical content being shown, I'm not sure that is entirely appropriate.
 
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Pieter Boelen said:
Just wondering.... Is it possible to set up the Twitter feed on heartsofoakgame.com to show ONLY the content flagged with #HeartsOfOakGame?
While it is, of course, nice to have PotC: New Horizons and other piratey/historical content being shown, I'm not sure that is entirely appropriate.
Click to expand...
Uh? Now it's completely gone. That's not quite what I meant.... :wp
 
I am updating the skin today from a design idea that @Ashinokami and I discussed a while back. It is a work in progress so if there are any suggestions please let me know and we can take care of it pretty quickly.
 
I like the new background, it's unfortunate that you can't see more of the ship though. I like the look overall, except for the white seems to be a bit on the dominant side and a bit harsh to me. Perhaps a bit more of a parchment color would look nicer.
 
Wished I could see it, but it seems my Internet is so crappy right now that the page won't load at all. :facepalm
 
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