Longbow: GXC 2.0

Ski resorts in British Columbia. Large cats. Projectile weaponry.

What do they all have in common?

These are code name themes used for major software development projects for Microsoft, Apple and GXC, respectively. While we’re not building an operating system, we do have a new platform in the works. And we think it’s pretty special, so we’re giving it a name.

For its simplicity and rapid creation, our current site was known as Spear. Several months ago, GXStudios (the parent company of GoCrossCampus) began work on Longbow, a project notable for its flexibility, range, and use by dirty Englishmen.

This is the reason why we’re often slow to address minor technical issues or build new features in current games. As I explained to one player earlier this week, we prefer that our site improve 20x in a year than 20% every month. Once our current site was stable, we really wanted to focus on the next quantum leap.

Currently, Longbow is scheduled to be released in phases, with the first phase coming in June. The most significant new functionality, however, will be realized later in the summer—hopefully in time for all of our Fall 2008 games.

While in the past we’ve only hired software developers, we are soon going to start opening some positions for business development associates. If you are at all interested, shoot me an email at brad@gocrosscampus.com.

Metric Mayhem

So things are doing pretty well at RPI. Depending on who you ask, we have:

- 25% of all on-campus residents
- 13% of all undergraduates
- 25% of everyone assigned to a team
- 600 players
- ?% of all @rpi.edu email addresses

Not too bad for four days after launch. However, we've been struggling over how to frame our data. All of the statistics above are correct, to varying extents. Teams only include people in on-campus dorms. However, off-campus residents, professors, grad students and alumni are allowed to join. But not many of them do -- everything from the map to the teams to the core players on each team are very undergraduate campus-focused.

So how do we grade ourselves?

I'll be discussing this tomorrow with people who have a much deeper understanding of this stuff than I do. With any luck, we'll come to some sort of conclusion on the best way to display our usership data.

Ugh. Why can't we be one of those sites that can just spew crap about uniques and page views?

Our time per sesh is niiice, though. It's not facebook-ish, but it is YouTube-ish.