Bytewire Ltd was formed towards the latter end of 2008 and to this day we have never had a logo we were fully satisfied with. We have had a range of different styles, colours and design but none of which we really fell in love with and which we were proud to say was our  logo.

Therefore we decided it was time to put this right and get a logo which we could be identified by. After all corporate identity is important with any company and even more so with one which bases a large part of its presence online.

We had several attempts to create the logo ourselves however after a long debate we decided we were too close and too involved with the company that it would be best suited to a specialist logo design company. Having drafted in the logo design company we set about explaining our criteria of what we wanted it to look like and what we felt the logo should achieve.

Design Phase 1

The design phase began with an agreement of 6 initial designs being created in which we would then voice our opinions over and then develop a particular logo from the choice.

Having analysed the 6 designs we received we felt that none of them really suited our genre of company. We were looking for a more gaming/techy feel to the design and felt all of these logos lacked that cutting edge…..back to the drawing board!

Design Phase 2

After more discussions between ourselves and the logo design company they set about designing more logos in attempt to get the look and feel of the design more accurate of that of a web gaming company.

Again the designs we received, although very nice, did not match the logo we could visualise a company such as ours having. The designs above would have fitted on a Garden Centre or similar but for a website and gaming company it just did not look right….back to the drawing board!

Design Phase 3

Determined to get a logo which we felt would mirror the image of our company we proceeded with more discussions to try and bring both ours and the designers thoughts closer together. They then went away and created the following.

Having finally received a couple of designs which we felt had potential we were pleased. The next step was to develop the two designs we liked, right hand side on the top row, and turn them into our company logo.

Development Phase 1

With a good base in place to develop the logo we wanted to refine these ideas and turn them into something more eye catching. One of the most important aspects of a logo for us was the ability to be identified by just the Logo Symbol for example a Nike tick. The next stage of the development aimed to work on this philosophy.

After receiving these logos from the design company we really felt we were getting somewhere with our logo but we had another problem, we now liked more than one of the logos designs, how do we choose?

Development Phase 2

In an attempt to make or break our decision about the logo designs we asked for one last attempt at developing the logos above. We felt we could go on and on with tweaks and adjustments but there had to come a time when enough was enough.

Although we liked these designs we were slowing warming towards one particular design which we felt represented our company well.

Decision Time

After our rollercoaster ride to find a logo which we liked and felt represented our company it was now decision time. As the logos progressed we were generally swaying towards one design more than others. However to give a chance to all logos we kept our options open and continued to ask for both of the original design ideas to be developed. The logo we chose to be our company logo is shown below.

We chose the logo above because we felt it suited our criteria the best. It can be used as a logo with or without the surrounding text, it fits our genre and it looks good. No doubt there will be further developments to the logo as time goes on but for now it works well.

Yesterday here at Bytewire we had a most interesting debate about something which was seemingly un-important when it began. Let me explain the situation and set the scene quickly, before I dive right into the debate at hand.

Our popular online game, Street Crime, which we have been developing for over 2 years now has a reasonably intuitive, clever design and interface. However as we have expanded on the game and built lots of new features we have found the left hand menu, which importantly is our main menu in the game growing increasingly vertically larger and is now in our opinion a little overwhelming for new players. The left hand menu is divided into subsections and each subsection is collapsable and expandable and the state is held as the user flicks through pages. The left hand menu consists of around 40-50 links to other pages, which is pretty large as things go.

So along comes Friday and we have a new feature to release into Street Crime, yet we are not sure where it belongs, on the one hand we want our players to see it but on the other hand we have got to draw the line at making the left hand menu larger and larger, somewhere right!? Looking at this in more detail made us start to think, how incredibly important menus, navigations and terminology of the items in the menu really, really was to our game and to the players playing it. After about an hour of deliberation we had split our views into two seperate view points or theories if you like.

The Blue Pill or The Spoon Fed Approach

The first of which is the Blue Pill or the Spoon Fed approach which regards users as thickle, lazy and that they require spoon feeding to find what they are looking for. We Adopted the blue pill/red pill matrix scene to our game, arguing that if you opted to take the blue pill, you are thickle and you want everything in front of you in an easy navigation menu with a simple one click depth and you are happy that you know this is where you will find everything and that it will only be a case of scowering through the long menu list to find what your looking for, look hard enough and you will find it. By looking at this approach we identified some pro’s and con’s particularly adapted to the way our online ‘game’ works.

Cons

• Menu items get forgotten about as they are hidden by the player to make the menu small and manageable enough.
• New players feel overwhelmed by a large menu
• Forcibly not allowing a user to explore deeper into the rabbit hole at his or her own leisure.
• Get what you click approach – not always the best approach especially not so for online games.

Pros

• Its quick
• Minimal effort
• You get what you click
• Everything is in the menu somewhere approach

The Red Pill or Depth In Pages Approach

“Take the red pill and see how deep the rabbit hole goes”.

Adapted from the matrix we thought up this approach amongst the theory that users are so thickle that if they need to find something that they know exists somewhere on your site, they will sure as hell try to find it. Which importantly for a online game, creates a contact point, especially so for online games with a chat facility – “hey does anyone know where i can find the weapons shop?” etc. It also allows you to think more logically about how your game is put together, ie, some pages relate directly to another so why not link back and forth to each one from that page. The more time a player can spend navigating around without returning to use the left hand menu the greater depth and indulgence you have managed to achieve. What this would also allow us to do is to spend time making our menu as concise as possible. Cutting it down from 50 items to just 10 and cutting out the collapsible and foldable menus. Take the example below for instance.

Current Menu

• Game Forum
• Off-topic Forum
• Crew Forum
• Bug Forum

Making this more concise could mean a link in the menu with “forums” which takes you to an overview page, perhaps with the 10 latest posts accross all forums and then links to the individual forums themselves. You have added another click level, but you’ve also improved the experience and likelyhood of them getting involved. As you have made the forums link more viewable and you’ve added an easy way for people to jump right into a thread from the overview page.

New Menu

• Forums

Another important factor to always remember when using a long list style navigation menu is that if its long, its likely areas are going to be forgotten about or due to the page fold don’t get visited as much as they should. This is the wrong approach especially with a social game. For us currently our forums are situated at the very bottom of our long menu and thus probably dont receive as much clicks and visits as they should do. With a new shortened menu, we can really put more emphasis on the real important aspects of the site in the menu and link the less important pages using a depth approach, clever linking and page relationships.

Cons

• All menu items and pages within the game are not accessible on a one click basis
• Lazy players may suffer.
• If implemented badly could add an annoying amount of extra clicks and time to perform routine tasks

Pros

• Intuitive
• Its not overwhelming at first and it lets the user dive deeper into the rabbit hole as and when they feel comfortable doing it.
• Its small and it makes sense

Although my opinion clearly sways to towards the Red Pill approach, this is not to say it will work on our site or indeed on your site. However, what you might be interested to know is we are going to run some tests and analysis of both approaches and see which one works better for us and then of course go ahead and implement it. If your interested to see how we get on and or would like to read our findings be sure to follow us on twitter @Bytewire.

Here at Bytewire we have the football fever! A few weeks ago whilst sitting in the summer sun enjoying a few quiet drinks after a kick about, some friends and us got thinking about upping the stakes a little bit this world cup, but we didn’t really know how or what we wanted to do. There were tonnes of people jumping on the dream team world cup site / apps wagon. But as there was no budget or any kind of valuation cap, everyone just picked similar teams of the best players. So we decided it would be more fun to run a predictor with points accumulation for the correct winner of each game and bonus points for correct score. We also introduced a few tie breakers like total goals in the tournament, total red cards, total yellow cards, top goal scorer, top goal scorer goals and top scoring team. As this seemed alot more difficult to end up with the same scores, and also alot more riding on every game. Especially if you and a friend are neck and neck for the prize pot at the semi final stage. Entry to the predictor costs £5.00 only.

The Prizes

• Winner takes 60% of the overall pot.
• Second takes 25% of the pot
• Third takes the remaining 15% of the overall pot.

Check it out here – http://worldcup.bytewire.co.uk

We thought it would just be a bit of fun and something a bit different to alot of other ones out there. All prize money goes into the pot, its literally all for free (well £5.00 but thats it).

One Last Thing

Remember to share, it would be really great if you could share the link to this bit of fun with the provided facebook share links etc on the predictor site. We would much appreciate it.

Its been a while since our last post on Bytewire so we thought it was time for an update on what we have been up to, what we have been planning and an insight into the future for us at Bytewire.

Recent news

We have focused our efforts over the past few months largely on our online game, Street Crime. Street Crime has evolved into a popular gangster text based game with now over 15,000 registered users and over 600 users playing on a daily basis. We have been working on improving and implementing new and old features to enhance overall gameplay.

Below is a short overview of recent additions to Street Crime :

• Turf Damage – Gangsters turfs now come under threat from a series of random events which cause damage to the buildings which costs money to restore. If a building reaches 100% damage it will no longer produce an income to the gangster. This feature is a replacement for the previous maintenance feature which was too static.
• Trade – Provides a secure feature for gangsters to trade various items such as casinos, cars, credits and crews with each other. Each player adds their side of the trade in and then locks in their items. Only when both players have locked in their items and finalised the deal will the items switch hands.
• Weapons – Street Crime now boasts a weapons locker of more than 30 different weapons which can be unlocked through earning Prestige throughout the game. There are 6 categories of weapons all of which serve a different role in the game. Weapons needs to be trained up in order to fulfill their potential when using them in an attack.
• Achievements – An additional 40+ achievements have been added to Street Crime to give gangsters additional tasks to achieve whilst playing the game. The achievements range from easy tasks such as crushing 350 cars to stealing 50 cars in succession without getting one confiscated by the police.

Coming soon to Street Crime

With the recent additions of Heavies, Turf Damage, Weapons and more we are now getting close to an announcement for Attack so stayed tuned for more information. We have been working on attack and all its interlinking features for sometime now as we hope to produce the most unique attack systems of any online game of this genre.

Look what our designers have been up too

Our designers have been busy building us some new graphics for Street Crime characters to replace our old system with a cool new fresh look. We’re naturally really excited about these new funky characters and will be looking to get the system into the game as soon as possible. Check out some of the characters we made below.

Our Plans

At Bytewire we believe its good to plan ahead and have therefore already discussed various key areas and key development projects we will be pursuing and developing in the near future. We are devoted to continuing to work in the online games sector as we continue to work on Street Crime and aim to create one of the largest gangster games on the internet. In addition to Street Crime we also have further game ideas which we have developed over time that we would like to see come to fruition, when the time is right and the development time is available from our already jam packed schedule.

We also plan to broaden our horizons by working on a Facebook game which we hope will open our games to a wider variety of users. In addition to this we hope to make mobile versions, including an iPhone application, of our current game Street Crime to ensure users can keep their accounts up to date even if they are not able to access a computer.

There are also plans to develop our core websites such as games top sites and a game advertising network as we feel these would accompany our core competences as a business well. More details on all of our upcoming projects will follow in the future.

The last 2 years or so have been a huge learning curve for myself and Elliot, we’ve gone from novice programmers to learning and juggling 4-5 different programming languages on a daily basis. Some might say an impossible task, except….its not. We don’t really feel like anything is impossible and we don’t feel like more knowledge can ever really be bad knowledge. It does however throw up a very good question in the life of a programmer and designer. When is taking too much on and learning too much really too much? When does juggling too many different things and trying to do too many different bits and bobs really start to affect the productivity in areas which are really the important ones to your business?

Well heres the view we take, get the work done that you need to get done in your normal daily working hours……then try maybe every other night spending an hour just looking at something new (somedays or weeks as us designers all know this just in reality may not be possible), read a book, learn something and before you know it you’ll be surprised at how much it helped or what that extra bit of knowledge might help you with in the future.

This could be as simple as writing a blog post, following some interesting people on twitter, spending the time just to see what other designers are up to or just setting personal goals together about what potentially could be most useful for you individually to learn for the greater collective of the company. Eg maybe what could help improve an existing project or maybe what we need to learn to unlock greater possibilities in the future. As techies we’ve somewhat got our work cut out, as you could never learn everything in our field of work, nor would it seem like a good idea to even try and attempt it.

Interestingly especially for us as company directors and full time designers / programmers we often have to prioritize our work as a matter of utmost importance. Not only do we have to pull all of the strings with the work load our products produce, but we also take care of all the running of the business. Thus if we spent all our time improving our own personal skills but not metaphorically speaking ‘putting pen to paper’ with any produce, its worthless to us as a company and after a while most likely Bytewire would be no longer.

I think that controlling this at a personal level is really difficult, even when you are a director of the company….just like me. I’ll always look at things other people have done and think woah I want to do that as well, but one thing weve learnt over the 2 years we’ve been a company is that produce comes first, refining and development comes after. After all first you must have a base to build from as the saying goes…..”don’t try to walk before you can crawl”. With everything you try to do, especially if you are running your own company you should try and tie learning it into a real product or finished product that could be of use. That way things aren’t simply just a waste of time from a business perspective. As a small business moving in a quickly changing environment its very important to get out there and make sure you identify what is ‘your thing’ and build your base here as quickly as possible. This is not to say you shouldn’t toy around, some of the best things ever made started out as just messing around to see what could come of a random idea. Infact that’s where Bytewire came from

So try something new, spend some time learning something, develop your skills…..but remember if your ever faced with a choice……fix or make something for a REAL project or spend time to learn something new. ALWAYS make sure the product comes first.

Today, 18th December 2008, we release our Bytewire Ltd website. Bytewire Ltd specialise in website design, online gaming, computer and laptop repairs and home networking. For a full list of services Bytewire Ltd offer please see the services page. The aim of the site is to begin building our web presence whilst also advertising the services and expertise that we offer.