I wouldn’t normally post about a webgame, yet I make an exception for this. My Brute is a pretty simple flash game in the RPG/Tamagotchi/Beat-Em-Up style, except that the only decisions you make after character creation is who you’ll fight. Each fight is out of your control, which can be as frustrating as it is a relief not to have to learn some fiddly controls. There’s a pupil system which works as an affiliate system with you earning experience when they grade, hence why I’m plastering my link all over this post. There seems to be plenty of scope to keep players interested and the random upgrades at each level are entertaining if not what you were really after.

Ultimately though this is all bog standard stuff. What really stood out for me was the complete lack of any signup. They don’t need an email address or any details, they don’t want you to create a profile even. The most they ask is for you to add a password to your character if you don’t want anyone else using it. In this day I had almost forgotten that websites don’t have to take your details, it just makes it easier for them to spam you everytime they change something or you haven’t visited their precious site for long enough. If I was to but something from a shop I could pay in cash and hear nothing more from them, yet if I went to the online store I need to create an account and provide all my contact details. The transaction is the same, with the exception of delivery, yet it’s standard practice to have an account for every other site you visit. The security problems alone are gargantuan, since nobody wants a different sign in and password at each place.

Anyway, it seems that for me to like a fun yet fairly standard game more than the competition, all it took was a less intrusive stance to my personal details.

I’ve now been running a new side project called Up The Arse Corner for about 3 weeks. It’s a daily image blog filled with images much like the one above with ambiguous and very possibly sexual suggestion of something not actually happening in the picture.

So far it’s going great, I’ve got plenty of posts and a decent backlog of posts scheduled. However I’m not getting much in the way of feedback yet, with no comments, only a few submissions from friends and the majority of hits still coming from facebook and twitter. At least I haven’t been targeted by any spam yet!

Unfortunately the lack of submissions is reflected in my fairly low traffic so far, a slight pain since so far most of my traffic is by word of mouth. I’ve had a little attention via search engines but very little in the grand scheme of things.  I’ll up the promotion a bit once I’ve got some solid content on the site, the daily updates are great for this and I’ve been slowly climbing several google searches, most importantly I’m currently ranked 6th for any search for ‘up the arse corner’, a good indicator for my site anyway. I’ll know it’s going great when I can drop the corner from that and still be on the first page!

Anyway, my biggest concern with lack of submissions is that this is where a lot of my content is going to come from eventually. At the moment I’m scouring the internet for images but that well is going to dry up eventually and I’ll need more eyes looking. The real skill is going to be balancing growth with input so I can keep the daily updates fresh.