#earlyninja

[earlyninja]

About Customer Support and Sensei

Hello! A priority here at EarlyNinja is to provide assistance and support for any issue that our community might experience. We believe that a solid customer support service is essential to create a reliable platform and that people must be able to communicate efficiently with the staff behind the scenes. For these and many more reasons, our task at the moment is to build an efficient support team that will be able to help our users with any issue they may experience on EarlyNinja. To be specific, our plans involve the creation of a ticket-based support and live chat assistance. We believe that these options will be able to satisfy the needs of our customers.

In addition, we at EarlyNinja will assign a personal concierge to all developers on the platform, the Sensei. The Sensei is an internal project manager that will aid the developer in managing all aspects of the project (or projects) they are currently working on. These aspects include primarily communication, bug reporting and feedback. The Sensei will be the medium between the community and the developer and will inform them of important news, reports or issues experienced by users. That said, we are still defining all the tasks in detail.

Again, thank you for your great support. We hope that by delivering such a high quality platform we make you happy and keep you playing as well.

Stay tuned and stay gaming!

[earlyninja]

Some updates on our development

Let’s talk a bit about our long-awaited platform. To date, the development of the platform is going pretty well. Our developers are working non-stop to deliver a high quality structure that’s solid from all standpoints. The platform will be laid out as follows: 

Homepage

Marketplace 

Community 

Support

We will focus on the Homepage and the Marketplace, as the Community and Support pages are still in the primordial phase of development.

We chose to adopt a clear and lean design for the Homepage. In terms of design choices, it is going to have a structure similar to that of GOG.com (we really like it) and here users will be able to see bestsellers, trending games, upcoming games and so on. We will also have a designated space to give visibility to the games of developers with the highest reputation on the platform. 

The Marketplace is the database of our games: here users will be able to browse games, filter them, buy them, post reviews, and read updates from developers. The marketplace is also the place where you will be able to monitor each game’s stage of development. Here you can see the structure of a prototype game page:

Users will be able to see at what stage of development the title is, and the progression status of the components of the game. All of this info will be inserted by developers through our Dojo, EarlyNinja’s developer page. The game page was specifically designed to increase transparency and awareness for people buying Early Access titles. Users will now be able to see exactly where their money is going.

To wrap it up, the Homepage and the Marketplace are almost completed and we are now working on the details to deliver a complete product by our launch date (Summer 2016). We are proud of the direction we have taken so far and we thank you for your strong support. 

Do not hesitate to send your feedback our way!

As always, stay tuned and share! 

[earlyninja]

Our New Year’s Resolution

Forget diets or gym memberships, this year our focus is to provide more on the EarlyNinja platform. We’re incredibly proud of the groundwork we’ve laid down so far -becoming proactive in attending industry events both locally and internationally and speaking to a diverse array of developers, members of the public and people from all over the net to ensure our community’s voice is heard, and reflected in the platform.

However, our work is far from over. And as long as there’s feedback, we'll be there to listen. So keep an eye on all of our social channels and be the first to know about EarlyNinja news and developments.

Happy New Year!

-The EarlyNinja Team

[earlyninja]

Sprucing up Our Store Front

Ensuring that our store front looks good is all about striking a balance -we need to include enough information to advertise the game but not overload the customer with clutter (or spoilers!) A space where information is easy to read. We are aware on a game's information page, we only have eight seconds of customer attention to create a platform where developers can sell their game and the long term vision for it.

We are adding YouTube embedding at the beginning of the gallery section as default. This was a requested feature to enable the customer gets the absolute most out of their time on the platform.

The description will be just visible on the bottom third of the screen (This will change depending on screen resolution and zoom value). We'll be formatting the text in a way so the game blurb is displayed without the need to scroll down, so that all major details will be available at a glance.

As the customer scrolls down, the page will reveal more in-depth information about the game, then leading to reviews and progress information such as the game's milestone history, future updates and development blog posts. Integrating social media is a big priority for us, but in terms of presenting it in an unobtrusive way, we'll be waiting to see what feedback we get from customers and developers.

Hopefully the next time we cover the game information page, we'll be treating you to a few screenshots!

Benjamin

[earlyninja]

Blog Post Week 16/11: Talking About the Storefront

This week, we'll be showing off the new latest build/iteration/version of the EarlyNinja platform. As it's the first build of the site we're making public, we're obviously pretty excited to unleash all of our hard work, and see what developers and the press make of it. But for now, you'll have to content yourselves with a few teasers...

…So, what can we tell you? Our priority has been getting the basic layout of the storefront for customers right. The storefront will include the home page and the individual games when one is selected.

For the individual game page, one of the major difficulties was showing as much of the game off as possible, without littering the screen with pictures, text and videos: resulting in an unorganised mess that helps no-one. So we are designing the platform to minimize the clutter as much as possible.

Another challenge we need to face is keeping all games relevant on the storefront home page. That's why a key aspect of the platform is rotating games so that they all get their turn in the limelight. Finding an algorithm that is fair but also unobtrusive will be crucial and is probably one of the biggest challenges when working on this part of the site.

Learning from other platforms’ mistakes is where the inspiration of EarlyNinja’s storefront comes from.

As time goes on, it will evolve with the rest of the platform.

A lot of developers have been interested in our platform on a conceptual level, but that's nothing compared to showcasing the platform itself.

Benjamin

[earlyninja]

Blog Post 9th Sept: Post Revo 2015

Week 9th/11,

Revolution 2015 was absolutely crazy. We met a lot of people who were interested in gaming but are not your traditional audience. Witnessing all the emotion players invest into their competitive gaming was truly inspiring. It's amazing to see that level of personal passion and excitement we really wish the team behind it the best for all their future events.

EarlyNinja is progressing well, we have completed the work on the landing page to welcome you to the EarlyNinja website, However, we are always tinkering away under the hood. We are working on ways to ensure that there is as much information as possible on the page so people know exactly what we are about. In the future, we will have use main EarlyNinja market place as the homepage but think of this as a nice placeholder until the beta is complete. Want more info about this? Contact us on the bottom form, or on Twitter.

We have more events and other various projects in the works, so be prepared to hear lots more from us soon. But for now, let’s hand it over to our technical department for more of the nuts ‘n bolts information.

Benjamin

[earlyninja]

Introducing... EarlyNinja!

Benjamin here,

EarlyNinja is a new project that is delivering a fresh way of selling Early Access games, making it fairer and easier to put money into gaming projects that you are interested in. We are achieving this by creating a system where gamers’ funds are distributed in development milestones. If the developers don’t meet their content deadlines, the gamer will be eligible for a refund depending on the amount of unfinished content.

What about games that are released quickly for a cash grab?

All games on this platform will undergo a verification process to see if they are playable or have enough content to justify being Early Access. In this way, cash grab games will not even see the light of day.

What about us developers, how does it work for us?

Well, the system in place rewards developers with more money depending on how much of the game development milestones they’ve completed. This is to give developers an incentive to reach their deadlines. None of the money will be touched by EarlyNinja or the gamer until a development milestone is met (when money will be delivered into their account) or when deadlines are missed (refund legibility period).

OK, so how do we make this happen?

Currently, the project is in the works and it needs your help to come to fruition. There will be a kickstarter campaign starting in October and the money raised from this campaign will fund EarlyNinja’s completion. People who choose to back and contribute to the project will receive exclusive access to the platform in a closed Beta stage. We will provide more information about the backer rewards soon and make sure we keep this space up-to-date. How else will we be able to keep in touch?

You can find us on Twitter and we have a project blog coming soon that will provide more in-depth details on the project. We will also have a bunch of video content to explore the project and the personalities behind it. Non-EarlyNinja related content will be featured on our social streams to keep people in the loop of Early Access gaming and independent game development. There will be more information available in the coming weeks. Stay tuned and stay gaming.

[earlyninja]

Wrapping up EGX 2015

EGX 2015 Blog Post

Well, that was a blast! We wanted to go to an expo so we decided that we should start in the UK with EGX 2015. Located in Birmingham, it was easy to get to almost anywhere and a direct train from Euston was more than enough to get us to the party. We actually came down on the Friday to check out all of the cool work done by many independent studios and do some recon work for EarlyNinja. It was super fun to discover all the different game concepts on show and speak to the developers on what they needed to do to make it to EGX. But man, were the games varied! They boasted an insane array of genres, with something for everyone-from strategy to VR technology. It’s this diversity which really makes the independent scene special.

We spent most of our time scoping for intel about our platform, and we had a ton of input from many developers. We’d like to thank everybody who took the time to chat with us and look forward to keeping in touch with everyone we traded business cards with

Outside of independent games, VR  was definitely the star of the event. Oculus, HTC and the Playstation VR all made impressive showings, and the hype surrounding these were reflected in the painfully slow wait times -meaning that sadly we didn’t get a chance to sample them all. As you can tell, we had a ton of fun at EGX, especially when it came to sampling innovative new games. Next week we'll be casting our critical eye on the finer details, with our top 5 indie games of EGX. Until then, stay tuned on Twitter for our latest updates.

-Benjamin