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!

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.