Wow! A Blog Post!

We are now back from a bit of blog-posting hiatus. :D

Longbow is now considerably further along, and thanks to all the beta testers who signed up. With any luck, you will be getting an email in the next month or so.

In other news, we've returned from the land of odd social experiments (see GoCrossStatus) and lauched our next open game, GoCrossZodiac. I think that this will be an excellent open game, and it was urged many times by our users. Not only do many people have an affinity to their birth month, but the teams are (theoretically) balanced. This was a problem with GXStatus, as we discovered that a decent plurality of our users were in some sort of relationship.

If GXZodiac goes on for as long as I think it could, our next open game might very well be launched in Longbow. No promises, though. It's not like we want to go down for a month or anything crazy like that.

We also have an awesome crew of summer interns on board, some of whom you'll hopefully get to know through this blog over the summer. Regardless, it's gonna make our New Haven office at 282 York packed! And I think the building maintenace just turned the heat off a few days ago -- evidently we were still having "some chilly nights."

Want to beta-test Longbow?

Sorry for the radio silence over the past few weeks. We've been focused on our ongoing games as well as some pretty exciting stuff we have coming up on both the software and business sides of things.

I want to post an additional call for people interested in beta-testing GXC 2.0, codenamed Longbow, this summer. If you think you will have some time to play GoCrossCampus over the summer and really bang around with the system, email us at beta-testers@gocrosscampus.com.

Congrats, TD!

Congratulations to Cmdrs. Joshua Geller and Jacob Levine of Timothy Dwight for leading their team to victory in the Yale Freshmen Olympics Tournament!

Not only did Timothy Dwight receive 200 points in Yale's annual Freshmen Olympics, but Josh and Jacob each get $250 in Campusfood Cash provided by our friends at Campusfood.com.

If you get a chance, check out campusfood's restaurant listings... on Yale's campus, they let you order from 35 different places in the New Haven area.

In the future, we hope to make prizes for commanders and teams a common thing. While pride is obviously the biggest reason to get on and play, it doesn't hurt to have a party to look forward to.

The Power Vacuum

A Swiss-style direct democracy? An exclusive military junta? An idi dictator? A bolivarian revolution?

How your GXC team is run is entirely up to you (and your teammates... maybe)!

Recently, you may have noticed that it's become easier to elect commanders. Whenever there is a power vacuum, any player on that team can open a commander poll with a single vote. While this ensures all teams have access to the special features exclusive to a commander, it can also be a double-edged sword: teams who aren't careful may end up electing an enemy or ill-intentioned player! Or even worse - elect too many commanders and drown themselves in a bureaucratic sea.

Additionally, the role of commander is becoming increasingly coveted, as you never know when a sponsor will decide to throw in a prize or two. Yale freshmen Jacob Levine and Josh Geller recently led the valiant Timothy Dwight Lions to victory, and got a $250 CampusFoods.com certificate in the process. Yum!

While most of our resources are still going towards developing the next quantum leap in GXCology, we're still implementing some minor changes to the current platform. Thanks for all the input so far. Check out our new forums, and keep fighting the good fight!

GoCrossCampus says "Bienvenido!"

By the way, GXC is so Hot right now, it could melt your screen! This week, as GXCers across the United States returned from their Spring Breaks in Cancun, sporting perfect tans and boasting about romantic conquests to rival their GXC Trophy Case, our team decided to test the waters in warmer latitudes.

The Tec de Monterrey (ITESM), a Prestigious university in northern Mexico, is the site of our first closed-domain game outside of the U.S., and also the first game to be carried out partially in a non-English language. Unfortunately, our gringo website is as of yet incapable of dealing with their sexy, accented vowels, but we'll make it up to them - we're so excited about this game we decided to throw in 2,000 pesos for the winning team's victory party. (We're not even sure how much money that is - but we're crossing our fingers that we'll still have enough to pay for servers next month).

Over the next weeks we will work to translate some of the materials on our site to accommodate the preferences of our new amigos. If you would like to help out with this effort, or if you want to help GXC expand to your world, let us know!! We're friendly, good-looking, and we even speak Finnish. (Poorly)

History!

Ever wanted to see how a game got to the way it is? Now you can.

Players can now navigate from turn to turn, and the Team Standings and What Happened boxes change along with the map. This feature has been long in coming as we've been working on other not-yet-released features (see below), but we're all glad to see that it's finally here.

Also in this week's release, the territory info bubbles have been cleaned up. It's now a lot easier to see where everyone is moving or attacking.

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.