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.

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.

David here again, the UI guy here at Conduit, prodded to talk a little about the process for designing the Loudcrowd logo. To jump right in – this first batch was just brainstorming to get things rolling and get all the bad ideas out.  The first few dozen ideas are going to be obvious solutions and invariably suck, so it’s best to just plow through them.  We knew we wanted Loudcrowd to be feel edgy, fun, a little ’social’ and ‘gamey’ even though everyone despises those words.  We also had our avatar style nailed down which is graphic with strong black outlines, so the logo needed a similar illustrative treatment.  We also wanted the logo to be uh… loud.  And possibly crowded.  This direction would haunt us for months… it would take over 50 logos to stop drawing speakers.

Noteworthy appearances in this initial batch are ‘the web 2.0 chat bubble circa 2004′ the donut shop, techno sock monkey, the vomitous mass and speakerbot.

Direction from this batch included ‘hand-drawn fonts are kinda crappy, let’s find some fonts’ and ‘it needs to be more cerebral.’  The idea was – we needed a clever idea.  Catchy.  Something that would take a second to parse so you could relish in your own ‘a-ha’ moment the next morning in the shower and congratulate yourself.  Like when you finally notice that subliminal arrow in the FedEx logo and realize why people pay design firms hundreds of thousands of dollars.  Incidentally, I wasn’t paid hundreds of thousands of dollars, and if I was, I would probably have already lost it in the recent credit/banking crisis.

So this second batch moved towards a few font selections, the final teal blue makes an appearance, and ‘loud things’ take center stage.  Firecrackers, bombs, a jackhammer, more speakers, a jet engine, etc.  ‘Music’ starts to make an appearance at this stage too.  You would think with Loudcrowd being a social/gaming service revolving around music I’d arrive there sooner, but you’d be wrong.

Of note in this batch – the first appearance of the retarded squirrel, which is now our ‘Sweet Loot’ mascot.  The ‘knob turned up to 11′ would have been both awesome and raw concept-theft.  And in my humble opinion, the handgun at the bottom is the best by far. I seriously thought that one nailed it, but then folks suggested that ‘hyper violence probably isn’t the best message for our product.’  Ah well.

So the team spent a lot of time going back to combining the initial concepts of music, play, and social.. ness. Combining concepts seemed to be getting closer, even if some of the actual combinations didn’t work. No one needed kids playing jump rope with audio tape. But the best concept here focused on Loudcrowd as synchronous music, more of a shared experience and less a kid drowning out the world with an iPod.  That was what ultimately resonated.

So the winner of this batch and our final logo, after a little more polish – features two kids listening to one pair of headphones. Two key concepts were nailed down, and hopefully ‘play’ reads in just a little because it’s kids doing something goofy.  Maybe not.  Mike mentioned it has a bit of a creepy siamese or ‘The Shining’ vibe to it, which in my opinion is completely awesome.

Reserve yourself a shirt so you can hawk it later on EBay.

Quickie post. A particularly sweet glitch in our render tech we’ve dubbed the ‘cubism bug’ reduces our characters to postmodern mulch. Enjoy.