The HG Blog

Continuing HeavenGames’ mission to serve and develop its community, it is revamping its main portal to provide general gaming information that all gaming enthusiasts will be interested in. First, news. Rather than being just a newsfeed for the rest of HG, it is going to be dedicated to becoming an important stop for gamers everywhere. Starting now, it will have industry news that gaming enthusiasts will want to know about, filtered for convenience and enjoyment. The newsies on the job are none other than long-time HG visitors Snook and aznninjahitman.

What’s coming soon? The esteemed Oliver - HeavenGames’ Art Director - is hard at work on a redesign of HG Main that better reflects the network’s mission. Morever, HG is exploring the possibility of having its own style of video game review. It is also investigating the supply of other articles about great games that are out right now but aren’t covered in a specific Heaven. HeavenGames Main will be for gamers, by gamers. Keep an eye out for more developments!

Battlefield Briefings. Okay, yeah, they don’t really apply to a blog in a video game vacuum. But man, they’e nummies. And I like to imagine myself as an armor-clad knight charging into battle…with a laser pistol. Laser pistol is clutch. Anyway, so what HAS gone on in HeavenGames? We’ve hired Oliver - the esteemed designer of both Starcraft 2 and World in Conflict Heavens - as our Art Director. (We decided to change the “Department Head” title to “Director,” the former is a wee bit too wordy.) The man is quite skilled and he’ll do splendidly. Baske has taken over the Marketing Department and is already hard at work; right now, he’s working on a contest that will pit the HG’s forumers against one another. Which forum reign as the champion? Keep your eyes out for information on how to enter and win glory across all of HeavenGames!

We’re also working hard on hammering out the specifics for HG 2.0, our automated content contribution system explained earlier in this blog. We realize that it’s taken a bit of time, but since this is going to be the biggest undertaking HeavenGames has had in years, we want to do it right. If I have my way, we’ll have a new logo with this somehow integrated in it:

Okay, what’s coming for HeavenGames? When we finish the specs for HG 2.0, I’ll post it on here for everyone to see and we’ll get to work on programming it. We’re also close to getting a new HG main, with gaming news, reviews, a new design, and all kinds of other scrumptious stuff. Also, Smash Brawl is coming out and there’s sure to be a self-indulgent videocast of me wrecking my friends with Zero-Suit Samus. Woooo!

See you on the battlefield!

A quick note to say that the RSS Feed for this blog works once again. We had some characters that were not encoded properly in the feed, which was breaking various XML parsers that download the feed.

We’re currently working on the design of our HG 2.0 system as described in an earlier post on this blog. You guys are going to be the ones using this system, so we’d like feedback from you guys as far as what features you’d like to see on it. Drop by the Outside Discussions thread to let us know, anything would be very much appreciated!

Hey all, I just wanted to wish everyone happy holidays. Of course, the date of this posting is prompted by the holiday that I celebrate, Christmas…but HeavenGames has people from all over the world from many backgrounds that have holiday celebrations at this time, so happy holidays!

And now, my Holiday gift to everyone:

I am actually a trucker.

It’s been a while since things started rolling with changes at HG, so I thought it’d be good to let you all know of some of the things that have been going on.

First of all, we’ve filled all of the Department Head positions except Art, as follows:

• Business Development: Brad4321
• Marketing: Avidwriter (Temporary)
• Finance: Lazidane
• Tech: Zen
• Operations/HR: Jayhawk
• Seraph Liaison: Elpea

Congratulations to all of them! We’re still looking for an Art and a Marketing head (Avidwriter’s doing a great job but can only fill in the job temporarily), so if you’re interested, fire off an email to me at socvazius@heavengames.com.

What have those guys been up to? Well, all kinds of stuff! Brad4321 at Business Development is busy working with the Seraphs to figure out what kinds of things their respective sites need with respect to asset/event support from developers. He’s also working on our pitches to various companies concerning content bundling and beta testing. Elpea has been work giving our dedicated Seraphs feedback about their sites and is working on redesigning HG Main into a page that covers gaming in general rather than just serving as an HG news feed. More details on that will come when the plan has been hammered out. Avidwriter has set up our Myspace page, definitely add it on our friends list! He’s also setting up a list of contacts for various news outlets (such as PC Gamer, Wired, etc) we can send news about HeavenGames happenings to.

These happenings are just a slice of what’s been going on at HeavenGames, and hopefully things will pick up even more when all of our department head positions are filled and everyone’s totally settled in (and finals are over, woo!).

As far as the design for HeavenGames’ content automated system, we’re still busy hammering out the details. Expect a post in the forums soon about getting feedback from you guys, since you’ll be the ones using it! In the meantime, if you have any suggestion, definitely send them to me via email.

Is that it? Well…almost. I need to tell everyone one more thing:

freakin burito, man.

About a week ago, HG staffers Elpea & Atzy, along with show guest Cheesewiz (HG Seraph from WICH), recorded the first HG podcast. This was intended to be a test of our capabilities and logistics (how to record from Skype, how to do it when your guests span two hemispheres, etc.), and was never intended to be released. However, after getting a lot of positive feedback and learning a lot of lessons, we were encouraged to release the very first episode.

We’re working on future episodes (in fact we finished recording the second one today, but there’s still a lot of editing to do), and we would like to hear from you on what you like and don’t like, as well as ideas and suggestions for upcoming podcasts. Comments welcome

So, with no further ado, here’s HG Podcast #1: The Pilot Episode (MP3, 19MB):

Show Outline:

• What is World in Conflict?
• What’s going on at World in Conflict Heaven right now
• Multiplayer in World in Conflict
• Age of Empires III Mobile - Impressions
• RTSs on Consoles
• Halo Wars
• Age of Empires’ 10th anniversary contest
• Age of Empires in our lives

Halloween. Black cats, pumpkins, candy, and dressing up. While I dressed up as a Naughty Nurse on the 31st of October, some of the Heavens here at HG got gussied up themselves.

First, Age of Empires III Heaven. The disgustingly saccharine-sweet Sailor Moon team cutesied the forums up with moons, hearts, and pink. So adorable that my head just might explode with kittens and happiness.

A fatal exception 0E has occurred at 0137:BFFA21C9. The current application will be terminated. That’s as scary as 15 Fire Giants riding Fenris Wolves, Age of Mythology Heaven.

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I’m a college student, it’s kind of a predestined thing. I’m always freakin talking about this, but to help get HG’s name out to everyone:

Join the HeavenGames Facebook group!

and

Friend me!

It’ll be a grand olde tyme, and the latter will get you access to photos like this:

I really have no idea.

So now that things have been settled with HG’s identity, it’s time to go on to the fun stuff: the staff system! Woo!

It’s been discussed in a previous blog post that HeavenGames doesn’t operate as efficiently as it could from a staff perspective. A lot of issues have already been dealt with in the past several months, but there are two substantial problems that must be taken care of. First, there is no effective way to ensure quality and consistency of work across all of our sites. Second, we do not have dedicated jobs in a number of support capacities, including marketing, sales, and the like.

Revamped Staff System

The owners have thus discussed the issue with the HeavenGames staff and have come up with the following system:

As you can see, HeavenGames will still be run fundamentally the same: the Exco - chaired by the CEO - makes all of the network-wide administrative decisions and Seraphs work under the Exco as site administrators. What will be added to the system will be a Seraph Liaison and Support Departments. First, the Seraph Liaison. In addition to being a member of the Exco, they will have the following responsibilities:

• Trains seraphs.
• Ensures our websites are in compliance with our vision (constantly updated, forums friendly to all users, involve visitors and entice them to participate, community forums are tended to, etc.)
• Develops programs to better serve the community (get staff to host more contests/tournaments, figure out strategy to encourage community participation, etc.)

The Seraph Liaison will work with the Seraphs to make their sites the best possible; they will help the Seraphs set specific goals for their sites and will help the Seraphs achieve them.

Next, the Support Departments. Support Departments will take care of a number of jobs that need to be handled for HG to be successful. These will be headed by a Department Head, which will need to ensure that their department - through their plan and staff - takes care of the following responsibilities:

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