The Interledger Community 🌱: Rush-for-the-web

Rush for the web — Grant Report #2

Rush-for-the-web — Sun, 13 Mar 2022 13:22:57 +0000

Project Update

🌟 We have been able to create and publish the game -- Rush for the web -- on multiple platforms since we last updated you of our progress 🌟

To keep our commitment to keeping all the assets developed for the game open, we were extra careful while designing the game and choosing the licenses & development platforms. All the illustrations created for the game have been released under CC-BY-SA 3.0 license and the source code for the android version is hosted on GitLab. A link to all the resources related to the game are added to our website https://www.rushfortheweb.org.

Our game rules are released under CC-BY-SA 3.0 too, what does that mean?

By releasing the game under an open license we have tried to bring down the barriers to free access and enabled our users/players to apply their own creativity and come up with different gameplays.

We encourage players to fork our repository or copy our print and play version, remix and share their own creations openly. This practice would also boost localization of the content to fit different cultures and context.

Progress on objectives

Our initial objective was to create an easy to reproduce game on web-monetization that educates players around the basics of web-monetization in the context of practical examples of monetizing their content over the web.

We're happy to say that have successfully been able to pull off our primary objective. But like any other creative process, the outcome did not completely match the path we had envisioned. In the process of game design, we had many learnings and realizations that considerably steered our next steps. Late in the process, we came to understand the performance related challenges of our game apps. We continued our work on producing a game application, but at the same time reused the assets to host a version on tabletopia to provide users with a better and well assisted gameplay.

We also stayed firm on our secondary objective to keep the process and the outcome open. Anyone can download the illustrations, rules, educational material for the game and create their own version and distribute.

Key activities

1. Creating a game to simulate the experience of monetising content over the web
We successfully created a game - Rush for the web - that educates players around the basics of the concept by simulating some practical examples of monetizing content over the web through its gameplay by assuming the role of a creator.

2. Creating an async version of the game
We had earlier decided to create a version of the game that could be played asynchronously by players across the world. Our initial bet was to leverage the messengers and create a set of stickers of the assets in the game to create a parallel lo-fidelity gameplay.

Down the path we came across many challenges while compressing the illustration and pivoted to creating a print and play version for a more practical asynchronous gameplay.

3. Playtesting the game
We did about seven playtesting session online, on tabletop simulator to polish and refine the gameplay before creating an application for the same. originally we had plans to conduct more sessions with groups of people outside our team and friends which became more and more challenging to execute with rising disturbances around the world. We decided to resort to a more passive approach to deal with that--through tabletopia. People have been playing our game on tabletopia and we have been looking at the available statistics to get a rough overview of the challenges players are facing.

4. Providing easy and open access to resources
To help with easy disovery of all the resources associated with the game, we created a website.

The website also links to other platforms where players can immediately start playing the game.

Communications and marketing

We presented about our game in the Creative Commons Global Summit 2021 and also spread words around the progress of the game through our Twitter account @rushfortheweb.

Our most important marketing material is our website, that we share at various platforms, since it provides visibility to every aspect of the game and also links to all the resources used in the game in most user-friendly way.

What’s next?

Polishing the gameplay is an ongoing process and we will continue to make improvemets to the game continuously.
We will continue to talk about the game in upcoming events and conferences and would even offer to organize a play testing session upon request.
We want to share the game and resources with schools and other educational institutions. We are already in talks with a few schools in Germany.
We are also planning to do a print run of the game and make the hardcopy available to schools towards the end of this year.

What community support would benefit your project?

The community is welcome to do play runs of the game in a setting of their choice, come up with their own remixes and share them. We would be happy to assist in the process and share the different variations created by the community on our website on request, with due attribution.

Our project on GitLab is also public, so anyone can fork the code base and come up with their own version of the application for android.

Additional comments

Working on the game came with a bunch of learning for us. We experienced first hand the amount of consideration that goes into keeping a game open to all, and more for ensuring a good level of accessibility.

In board games, to ensure that a gameplay is not restricted by language, special care has to be taken to keep the language dependency to the minimum. Our target is to continue to reduce the language dependency score of the game for better accessibility.

Relevant links/resources (optional)

https://www.rushfortheweb.org/

LaunchPad — Grant Report #1

Rush-for-the-web — Sun, 10 Oct 2021 15:45:42 +0000

Project Update

In our grant proposal, we had proposed creating an educational resources to teach the masses about web-monetization and the various catches involved while deciding on the platform and monetization methods over the web. Hence, coming up with a gameplay that’s educational, fun and easy to grasp, all at the same time, was the hardest milestone for us at Project LaunchPad and we are successfully past it after many rounds of play testings, feedback and improvements.

What comes next for us is to build the required assets and infrastructure to enable users to be able to access and play the game easily, without making it very technology/platform/operating system dependent.

To ensure that we are able to meet our objective in the given timeframe, we kicked off multiple efforts in a parallel. The details of our progress are below.

Progress on objectives

The initial objective of the project was to create an easy to reproduce game on web-monetization that educates players around the basics of web-monetization in the context of practical examples of monetizing their content over the web.

We are spot-on with the progress on our primary objective, however, we took an additional step to ensure the game can be reproduced in all 3 formats - print, digital and well as an async version to ensure accessibility and inclusivity for any player who couldn’t afford a decent internet or constant access to a specific medium.

Key activities

Created a digital prototype to play-test and refine gameplay
Being remotely distributed, we worked on a digital prototype for the game concept using Tabletop Simulator, to play-test and refine the gameplay.
Started the illustration work for the work

We commissioned Parvati Pillai, a digital artist, to illustrate the visual assets for the game we’re creating as a part of the project.
Wrote a blog on web-monetization
We wrote a blog on prototypr.io to educate readers about Web monetization in the simplest of language
Presented at CC Summit
We presented about the work we are doing as part of project LaunchPad at the recently concluded Creative Commons Global Summit 2021.
Started work and made big progress on game web-app backend work
We started work on the game-app and made an immense progress on the back-end work. Can be seen on our GitLab repository.
Started working on the graphic design deliverables - website and rules book

The work on the website and rules book design is still in progress and awaits final illustrations and iterated rules for teh gameplay.

Communications and marketing

We have set up a twitter page for communications and marketing. The page doesn’t see a lot of activity today since we are focusing our energy on building the game currently before we talk about it widely.

CC Global Summit 2021 - We presented about project LaunchPad in the recently concluded Creatives Commons Global Summit 2021. This was a very fitting platform to speak about the project for the first time, because we learnt about Grant for the Web for the first time during a Creative Commons event back in 2019. There was a lot of interest shown in the presentation and it’s content. We also anticipated

What’s next?

We are yet to make a decent progress in the following areas:

UX refinement and frontend work for web-app
Completing illustrations for the game, logo and box-art
Completing website design and graphic design work for the gameplay booklet
Translating the gameplay to a messenger friendly version using the same assets

What community support would benefit your project?

We would love some support from the community to play-test the different versions of the game and to spread the word about it in months to come. We would ensure we develop communication kits that are easy to circulate and consume.

There would be need to test the gameplay with audience of different age-groups and demographies. For this we would especially need help from the educators in the community to learn how to approach these audiences and the points that we should keep in mind while engaging with them. Our prediction is that by teh end of October we should be able to roll-out the alpha of the game design - both, print and web app - so they could be playtested outside the group. Drop us a message if you want in on the updates.

We are trying to keep the game very minimally language dependent. However, going forward, when the games evolves to a satisfactory level, we would also need help with translating the game-play rules to different languages.

Additional comments

We are using our connections in the gaming industry to learn best practices, distribution techniques and at the same time the future prospects for the game that is following all the open standards, which is not quite a norm for the industry yet.

Besides the progress on the game, we also want to document our experience working on a game that takes into account the limitations to accessing a content and also consuming it.

We are always open to discussions and suggestions. Please reach out to use(Michael and Veethika) to discuss any scope for collaboration.

Relevant links/resources (optional)

Our Gitlab Group of projects: https://gitlab.com/projectlaunchpad
Our twitter page: https://twitter.com/hilaunchpad

Blog to educate friends on `web-monetization`

Rush-for-the-web — Mon, 02 Aug 2021 06:45:00 +0000

Wrote a blog and published it on Prototypr to share the narrative on the role web-monetization has to play in making web a fairer space. I'd love to get some feedback around this. I could still make edits and corrections to the post.

https://blog.prototypr.io/quick-introduction-to-web-monetization-39e3556fd04a

Progress Report #1

Rush-for-the-web — Fri, 09 Jul 2021 06:50:58 +0000

📣 Project Update

In the first month after officially kicking off our project, we wanted to ensure that we deliver the maximum value to our users/players through our game. We spoke to a group of interested people who are also creator, who shared about their experience of attempting to monetize their content over the web, successful or otherwise. These interactions provided us with a set of insights into the process, key concerns and the overall value-chain.

⏳ Progress on objectives

Now that we have a clearer insight into the series of actions and the value they represent in the process of monetizing content over the web, we have started to investigate around the appropriate mechanics. We reckon the best way to do is is to start making paper prototypes. Being a geographically distributed team, we are using tabletop simulator to create the early prototypes.

👩🏻‍💻 Key activities

User-research: We got in touch with creators to understand their key concerns when it comes to earning a revenue for their work/content over the internet. We asked them some specific questions about the steps they follow to setup their online shops and the payment channels. The findings and insights from this exercise would help us come up with the basic structure for our gameplay.

Project branding: We did a small exercise around coming up with a logo and brand image for the project for the social media platforms.

✨ Creating online presence:

Communications and marketing
We now have a Twitter presence. We would be using our Twitter handle to interact with the outside world and to attempt to plug ourselves in into the interledger and web-monetization related conversations already happening in the twitter space.

💭 What's next?

We are now looking at organizing the findings received from the dipstick research and translate them into resources for our game prototype. As mentioned before, we would now be making some paper prototypes to kickstart the discussion around the gameplay and game mechanics.

🤝 What community support would benefit your project?

We would need willing participants who would like to review the early prototypes for LaunchPad game and help use shape the content for the game. The link for the prototype would be shared as soon as we have a version ready.

In the meantime, any suggestions or advice, or even anecdotal lessons from the community is welcome 🙂

LaunchPad says Hi👋

Rush-for-the-web — Sat, 19 Jun 2021 12:31:28 +0000

Hey everyone.As a part of the process of validating our problem statement we're conducting this short survey to identify gaps in the web-monetization space. If you identify yourself as a maker or creator, please fill out this short form to help us further our research.

https://forms.gle/MuhWoAyfLxh2kcgm7

Any help in amplifying the reach of this survey is more than welcome! 🙌