We updated the Loudcrowd servers a little while back with some pretty major additions and it’s about time for me to take a break from playing Spark and tell you all a little bit about it…

Spark Game

Loudcrowd’s latest game, Spark, is a music-based puzzle challenge.  Solve the puzzle by lighting up a path to Speakerbot and return power to his lifeless carcass. Check it out by heading to the Party page and choosing a Spark Challenge!

Music Page

We’ve added a new section dedicated to music, so you can stay up to date on Loudcrowd music.  Head here to read the latest reviews, get the playlist schedule for the month, or view information on one of the recent tracks that played.  You can also “heart” and comment on songs now to let everyone know what tracks you dig!

Shop

You got tokens, we got loot.  Spend your hard earned tokens and LP in the new Loudcrowd store to handcraft a killer new outfit or grab some tracks that you have been looking for. Check out some of the new items like the Major Lazer’s Commando Bandolier (YUP, it has an actual laser)  or maybe some sweet pirate pants. Window shoppers are welcome, and feel free to try some items on!

Hi, Internet! We just pushed out another update to Loudcrowd – here’s a list of a few features that we’re excited about:

Impress Game

Our third game, Impress, has arrived! It’s like playing fill-in-the-blank if you were playing fill-in-the-blank with someone that was crazy bananas.  You’ll be quizzed on a variety of categories such as music and general knowledge by a handful of new Loudcrowd characters. Check it out from the challenges screen!

Gifting and a boatload of new items

Got a friend that just joined Loudcrowd with a busted looking outfit? Send them something from your closet to show you care! We’ve got tons of new items that were just added, so you’ll want to clear out some room in there anyways. Don’t forget that if you’re running low on space you can increase your closet size by purchasing some LoudPoints.

Clothing Color

There’s been a long-standing bug with clothing where equipping different items (in different orders) would result in your clothes changing colors own their own. While this made it much easier to acquire matching outfits (in fact, it was nearly impossible to mismatch), it also severely hampered your abililty to be a unique and individual snowflake.

The good news is that this bug is now fixed! You can now mix and match to your heart’s delight, expressing your inner-most desires through your clothing! Beware though, with great color-mixing power comes great responsibilty – please try not to blind your fellow players.

Misc

-The Spin game has undergone a few changes to add a extra excitement.  It’s a lot more fast paced and we think it’s a good improvement.
- Expanded Facebook Support. We’ve made it a lot easier to let your friends on Facebook know what you’re up to on Loudcrowd. You can post to your wall about a song you like, challenge someone to a game of Spin or send an invite for them to check out the site on their own!

So come check out our music games and tell us what you think on our feedback page.

We updated Loudcrowd yesterday with a whole bunch of bugfixes and a major update to how we’d like to get feedback from our users.

Our new system is through Uservoice and will help us get a better feel on what you guys want and how badly you want it.  All you need is a Loudcrowd account (no seperate username required) and an idea to get started. If you see a feature that someone already requested, you can add your own votes and comments to make sure we know you want it. We love the simplicity and hope you will too.  Anyways, enough reading about it – go check it out by logging in at http://loudcrowd.com and clicking the Feedback link at the bottom of the page!

What do you do after successfully going into public beta? Well, you party a little, you sleep a little, and maybe take a peek or two at what the press says (Wired, Associated Press (via Washington Post), Xconomy, Gamasutra, etc). My favorite bits from the last week:

from Wired: “When we won our first track after performing well in a DJ game, we were thrilled even before we heard it. This is an intriguing way to get people excited about music, because it encourages active listening.”

from a personal blog: “The final takeaway that Loudcrowd leaves in your memory, is that there’s a party going on at the site, whether you are there or not, and if you want a little.. take a visit. That’s a powerful feeling to have after just using a site once.”

But before we get too caught up in all the positive hooplah, it’s time to remember that this is essentially the starting line. Sure, there’s another game coming in a month, and new playlists that will go up regularly, but there are also huge sections of the site we have yet to put online. How do we add group coordinated play? How do we take advantage of how much you guys seem to love stamps? How can we give users more control of the experience? How should we manage when there are multiple playlists at the same time? How can we expand the music selection but maintain our vibe? And how do we continue to add all the depth we have planned while making it at least 50% easier to understand for new users?

Just glad to have you all along for the journey.

Its been a crazy few weeks here at Loudcrowd …we’ve been building up our private beta for eight months, and we’re right about to release!  I for one have been zonked getting together our new playlists-can’t say who just yet, but trust that they’ll be featuring a slew of new tracks and rarities. It’s going to be a few more days of burning the midnight oil, but then off to South by Southwest to sweat it out and party down.

A bunch of Loudcrowders will be down in Austin to show off our new improved site, so naturally we are throwing a killer party We’ll be celebrating our release with the Rock You Shamrock party- headlined by Kid Sister, Datarock, and Hey Champ, 3/17 at the Speakeasy.

We’ve got some VIP passes to give out, so send an email to sxsw@loudcrowd.com that you’re coming to the event, and we’ll enter your name into the drawing.

Here’s our full schedule for those lucky enough to be joining the SXSW festivities:

3/13-3/21 Play Loudcrowd in the hallways of the Austin convention center, come see us near the ScreenBurn arcade
3/13-3/21 Hang out with us at the PureVolume house. every. night.
3/17 Our CEO, Nabeel Hyatt, speaks on the topic “Are Games the Next iTunes?” – 10am (seriously, you can do it then go back to bed)
3/17 Party with Loudcrowd at the Speakeasy

Come say hello if you’re there!

—Fucci

A look behind the scenes! Here you see Josh Hubball (VP of BD for Conduit Labs), Michael Dutcher (general manager of Dim Mak) and Nabeel Hyatt (founder / CEO of Conduit). They’re in the offices for Dim Mak. But you could probably guess that by looking at that DJ stand, covered in their distinctive logo. (I like how the low ceiling makes Josh look like a giant. Dude is tall, but he’s not Kobe.)

In preparation for Loudcrowd’s release — you know, beyond beta — Josh and Nabeel traveled to L.A. and San Francisco last week to hang with various music industry/ gaming/ web 2.0 bigwigs. Nabeel writes: “We had a great conversation with Dim Mak about lots of things we can do together, and left fully loaded with T-shirts and CDs.”

What does this mean for you, aside from a reason to be jealous of some people you probably don’t know? It just means there will be a wealth of awesome music for the game from the get-go. And that things will only get awesomer for Loudcrowd from then on. Just you wait! So, now that you know this, you can rest and enjoy the remainder of your President’s Day… Like, you can see what’s on TV during the daytime. Or, that IKEA sale looks pretty awesome! Me? I’m going back to bed.

—DJ Yeti

We’re extremely proud to congratulate one of our newest employees, Seth Sivak, for his work on Winds of Orbis, which was recently awarded as a winner of the Independent Games Festival 2009 Student Showcase. Winds of Orbis features ground-breaking use of the Nintendo Wii-mote and floor pads to promote more physically active play. See more (including a video of the game in action) here.

We here at Conduit love seeing games that explore new frontiers, so we’re thrilled to have Seth become part of the team as our newest Gameplay Engineer. (Stay tuned to see his newest creations on loudcrowd.com!)

How’s the second game look?

I’m officially very excited about getting all the stuff we’ve been hacking away at out for you guys to start playing with. This past week we invited some of our most passionate private beta users, as well as a handful of folks who have never used the site, to come by the Conduit HQ and give some feedback on the latest set of changes that are about to go live. Or, as we like to call it, the “pizza test.”

One of the first surprises was the extent to which folks who have been playing Loudcrowd a lot have figured out every nuance of the scoring and mechanics, thanks for caring! Then we got down to testing the entirely new site flow that we have been planning to do as soon as we launched our second activity. We took the requisite hits for a few UI inconsistecies and bugs that we have since worked out, but the best news of the evening was the unanimous thumbs up for the next game to hit Loudcrowd. We are pulling a few more late nights than I would like getting this next release out, but I’ve got the suspicion it’s worth it.

We had Governor Deval Patrick in our offices on Friday playing a little Loudcrowd and talking startups. In case this becomes a trend, we’ve decided to start a Facebook group called, “Politicians playing Loudcrowd.” Hey, you never know.

You’ll be happy to hear that the Governor, besides being all buddy buddy with the new President, also does fairly well at dancing for random college kids online.

For all of you in the private Beta, we’ve got an update that will make the perfect stocking stuffer to fill your long winter days. So come on by and check it out!

Tracks Page and dB

With this release, you can now collect songs that you can play for everyone to hear, it’s our jukebox for everyone.  As long as a Guest DJ isn’t currently playing, you can queue up your song and include a shout out which will show up at the top of the page in the “now spinning” area. These tracks will drop as sweet loot from the dance game and you can make the request from the new “tracks” page.  You’ll have to spend some dB to make the song request, but you can build up plenty of it by playing.

Performance Improvements… Seriously

We’ve done some work on performance in the past, but this time around we went a little crazy re-doing much of the front end of Loudcrowd.  We started with a complete retool of our site to take better advantage of the features Django has to offer.  This should elminate some weird behaviour that happened from time to time on the old version.  We also tore Flash a new one and drastically increased perfomance in the dance game, which includes a massive reduction to the memory footprint.  Don’t believe me? Look at this graph!

As an added bonus, we’ve added a sweet trippy effect to the dance floor (see screenshot at the top of this post).  Get into the groove enough and you can see it for yourself.

Invites

Have some friends that want to get into the Beta? Now you can earn invites and send up to 5 at a time to your friends using Facebook. Now when you say, “I know a guy who can get you into the club,” you’ll be talking about yourself!