What follows is a longwinded post about Starmen.Net, Fangamer, the store, and where all three of them are going. This started out as a much more concise post but I wanted to explain why this is happening.
Forumly Foundation
The Fangamer Store is owned and operated by Fangamer, a company founded this year by myself and a handful of Starmen.Net staff/oldbies. Our goal is to rebuild Starmen.Net and then use the new site as a template for building communities around other great games. Unfortunately, to do that, we need money. Using Fangamer investment money, I paid myself and ROFISH while we spent the first half of the year designing and developing this forum software. There are still bugs (I’ll be getting to them eventually I promise), but we feel that this new forum is both a success and a solid foundation for the work which we’ll eventually begin doing on the site.
Unfortunately, development is expensive, so we had to stop coding once the money ran out (and ROFISH resumed college classes) and begin searching for a better way to generate money. You may remember that, a little less than a year ago, we tried putting ads up on the forum. It worked — the ads generated a couple hundred dollars of revenue — but it kinda sucked and wasn’t really ‘worth it’, so we left the ads behind after moving to the new forum. I won’t say definitively that they won’t return, but they’re not in the cards at the moment.
Click the jump to read more!
Continue reading ‘On Fangamer and Expansion’
Lots of Fangamer Store news today as we’ve got several new items in stock, as well as some details on future plans!
I’m particularly fond of the EB Yourself Shirt because it’s a deep red shirt printed with a metallic silver ink. It looks great, and it’s an American Apparel shirt, which I prefer over bulkier, boxier shirts. Note that we’ve got womens cuts, too!
I’d like to draw attention to the merch forum topic I started called “On Fangamer and Expansion” in which I outline some of our reasoning/plans for expanding the scope of the merch in the Fangamer Store. Long story short, we’re looking to start producing merch for other games in addition to EarthBound, and would love to hear your thoughts.
Personally, I’m a big Chrono Trigger fan, and with the game being re-released on the DS in November, I think that’s where our first non-EB design will focus. Anyone have a good idea for a CT shirt?
I’m going to attempt to keep this blog up-to-date, even if I only publish changelists. Unfortunately, I don’t do the banners. That’s Reid’s thing.
If you notice, the forum now has much awesome searching. Much love to Sphinx, our search engine, and Chronic, the natural language date parser. Since a search query isn’t required, you can easily look at all of reidman’s posts in the past week. I’m not 100% happy with the search interface. I can’t decide if I want to have a complicated search page like normal a forum that has a heavy page weight, a variable attribute selector like on Leopard’s Finder search or Mail.app’s Mail Rule’s screen, or having a Google style single bar that pro-users can type what meta-data to search by.
I still have a huge laundry list of big ticket items before I start work on the main site or do minor forum bugs: (View them after the jump.) Continue reading ‘Awesome Searching’
And you guys thought this blog would never get updated…
Well to recap what’s happened since April(!), we launched the new forum without too terribly much of a hitch. There’s been a few hiccups along the way, things not working after caching issues, Passenger issues (which, thankfully, have been fixed with the later versions), Textile issues, logins ’sticking’ instead of forcing people to logout, and login issues with the main site. While my list shrinks, there’s still more to do!
After the jump, I explain the upcoming future for the main site.
Continue reading ‘Whew, it’s been a few long months.’
We won’t be able to do the public beta this weekend. Reid and I have some personal matters to attend to.
Originally I wanted to release it last weekend as more of a preview build, to show off to you guys and bug test. However, now that we’ve slipped beta release a few times now, Reid and I want to have the forum completely and totally polished when we show off to you guys. See you guys next week!
Welcome to this month in Fangamer… we should probably update more often, but Reid and I have been working with bugs, bugs, and more bugs. I do have some extremely good news though, we’re almost ready for a public beta. You need a forum account on our current forums, so those of you who aren’t members of Starmen.Net can participate. More will be coming within the week…
While we’re at it, we’re announcing the Smilie Contest. When trying to find a royalty-free set of smilies, we came up with the idea of letting our users design our next set of smilies. We’ve been paying attention, and really like some of the stuff in the Smilie topic. We’ve been designing this for awhile, and we got to thinking: What if the winner releases their Smilie set into the Creative Commons? That way, a whole lot of other cool developers can use it too! :D
It’s been a month since our last post! We’re not dead. In fact, things are going quite well. Reid’s finally working 100% on the CSS, and things are looking really, really nice! What better way than to show off some screenshots?
First here is a screenshot of the front page. We got a lot information on this page. As you can see, we have the forum spy on the right, but also latest posts below the forum as well. You can expand or collapse any forum or category as you wish. You can’t see it here, but the subscriptions show updates to your favorite posts in the same manner as well!
Continue reading ‘Screenshots!’
I’ve been working on the forum for quite awhile now, and it’s almost finished. For example, today I added the thumb up/thumb down functionality. I’m getting down to the more useless stuff, which is nice. Despite a couple of missing features, I could probably switch the old forums tomorrow if I wanted to. (It might be missing Reid’s CSS though, heheh.) The biggest thing missing is a more complete PM system. It’s slightly functional right now, but 100% ugly, and missing things you’d normally expect from PMs.
Continue reading ‘Forum is Coming Along Nicely!’
The second half of my insane-o long post, wherein I’ll be discussing the work we’ve gotten done on Fangamer’s design/code since February. A tl;dr summary for the lazy among us:
- I got some mockups done
- Started work on the XHTML/CSS
- Ryan has made TONS of progress on the forum
Again, we’ve got some more banners to show first!
Continue reading ‘Getting Things Done’
A quick summary of what’s been going on:
- Got a new computer (I can Photoshop again!)
- Got a loan for Fangamer
- Got a handful of investors/owners
There’s a lot more, but this is already a huge post, so I’m actually going to split it up into two updates and post the second half tomorrow. Before I jump into the details: the Banner Contest strikes back with another big update! Here are three of the 12 new entries:
Continue reading ‘More Money, Less Problems’
