If you're a true fan, you may have noticed that the Oh, Buoy! preloader contains a short clip that reads "FENGRUSH" in green text.

Fengrush, historically, if the name of a dwarf in Lineage 2 that was operated by my good friend Steve Boland. I always found it funny that in Lineage 2 you'd be hard pressed to find a roleplayer, but if you put anyone in control of a male dwarf, they suddenly transformed their mannerisms to that of a disgruntled stout little man. Fengrush was no exception. I wish I still had the video from 2004 or so of Fengrush charging bravely into enemies and being slaughtered. These days, Fengrush is the name of Steve's Orc Destroyer on the Teon server who smashes skulls and shows no mercy, but the point of this whole thing is that I've decided to name my game operations after him.

So, back around early Spring when we were putting finishing touches on Oh Buoy, I met a fellow named Smith. He's a web designer from Romania, and has amazing talent. He's been slowly building up a site to host these games for me, and I think it's finally in state where others can start to appreciate it. Check out the fully functional blog at Fengrush.com.

I think it's actually a lot better than this canned premade blog here at The World Takes. He's added custom emoticons, has a blog rating system, and you need to be a registered user to comment which prevents spam -- even if it is a little less convenient for everyone who doesn't want to register.

The whole layout is extremely green at the moment. I like it, but I think we might tone the logo down. The green low contrast logo is a little much for me. But overall, I think it looks awesome and couldn't ask for anything better.

Let me know what you think, either here or there.

Two really interesting things floated through my interwebs today while working, and I wanted to post them while they're fresh in my head because I will absolutely forget to do it if I wait until I get home.

The first thing is Adam Martin's blog. He works for NCSoft, so he's already cool to a Lineage junkie like myself. But in an ultimate reversal of things, he's actually blogging about the systems that make Kongregate such an awesome destination! Check out the blog he wrote about our reputation systems.

Really good stuff in there -- and it's awesome to have someone writing so in depth about the site. I've been feeling a like we'd been getting looked over by the industry folks as he suggested, but clearly some are taking good notice :D

So that was rad, but the next awesome link comes from something Raph blogged a little bit back. It's a NY Times article about Eve's Council of Stellar Management player summit in Iceland. Really cool idea. At Kong we have a really good connection to a lot of our users. I talk to no less than 5 different users every day on instant messenger, and dozens through email on a daily basis. However, the people we chat with don't really have the same sort of goal as the folks in this article. It's a really cool idea. I'd love to experiment with something like that if it turns out to be a good idea for CCP.

Anyway, that's all for now. Email queue is HUUUUGE back to work!

I went to lunch with Daniel James last week. It probably put my life into perspective better than any other single recent event. Before Kongregate, I was sitting around my room in Jersey, trying to work out how I could get an internship with Three Rings Design, and only slightly more than 1 year later, I was eating with their CEO and discussing business. Damn!

I don't have much to say about the lunch. I learned a little bit about running a microtransaction system that will be applicable to my job. I was largely on the same page as Daniel when it comes to this indie industry of online games, and the ways in which we earn our money.

Oh well, should stop wasting time typing here, and get back to making games - right?

Just thought it was worthy of mention :)

Addendum: In an effort to make that lunch sound much cooler than it was, I may have excluded the fact that I would not have gone had Jim not invited me, and Matt and Greg had not allowed me to go and represent our community/support side of the site.

So to clarify, Jim and Emily are much cooler than pirates -- even though Emily lied by telling me that San Francisco would be cold. Well, half lied. It's cold between the heat waves.

=.=

Matt and I thought we'd be clever and he would learn enough AS and I would produce enough art to make an entire game in one weekend.

Turns out, we cant do that. On the other hand, at least it provided the impetus to spend our time wisely in game development while we're out here in the same room. I'm hoping the result will be a few games produced over the course of the summer, but maybe not. Who knows.

Other things going on:

On Wednesday of last week the entire company of Kongregate was together in the same building for the first time ever! We went bowling. I was not that great, but not that terrible either. We finished the game, climbed up on the roof of Kong HQ and got drunk.

Thursday, we planned a group activity of sailing around the bay. We all got on a boat, and sailed around the bay, past Alcatraz, under the Golden Gate Bridge, and saw lots of cool stuff. Unfortunately, it was incredibly cold, but still pretty cool. We went to dinner afterward at a pretty awesome Italian place, where our server noticed my 'mc chris live 2007' t-shirt, and struck up a conversation about it. I told him that Chris Pasley formerly worked at Adult Swim with mc chris, and we chatted with that dude for a while as we waited for our cab. It was almost as cool as being noticed for working for Kong. Being noticed for working with a guy who worked with a guy who does nerdcore rap is sort of cool... kind of...

Friday we did our company offsite, discussed the future of Kongregate and things like that. A motion was raised to turn off the site and go start a new company that sells grape-flavored apples. Unfortunately, we discovered that the graple business is a tough one to break into, so we decided the Kong will stay up and running for now, and we might even release Kongai soon! O_O!

Oh and there's a couple of other massively awesome things coming to the site soon. But such things will be made public in time I guess!

Fourth of July is this week. Hopefully will do something rad for that, and then get back to trying to make games at some point!

Trenton Makes bridge is obviously still superior, but we went down to take a few pics of our new local bridge. Golden something.






Sorry for the blur/focus on that last one. It was getting dark, so we had to use a long exposure time setting, but my hands are quite shaky and it didn't work out very well.