Thanks and hunts.

I'm going to take today's topics in reverse order. The Peace on Earth Hunt is a monster of a hunt. Over 300 stores (I've heard numbers as high as 365, but not officially - guess I'll find out when I finish it) with almost a month to push through it. I imagine that a minority of people will take that long to make it through.

Of course, the purpose of a hunt like this is to generate traffic and sales for the stores participating and introduce new people to stores they haven't seen before. But what happens is that there's a big rush at the beginning of the hunt, with everyone trying to get through as much as they can before they get tired of it (mostly thinking that they either don't want to miss anything or that if they don't rush, they won't finish in time). What this does is push lots of avs through the stores, really fast, rarely staying long enough to look around the stores to see what they're selling. In Colorskins' case, if you can't guess from the name of the blog, we sell fantasy skins in a multitude of colors - 54 colors, to be precise, with specialty skins coming and going. But, while this hunt has definitely raised our traffic numbers, it hasn't generated a lot of sales.

So, what do I think should be done about it? Maybe a second wave of the hunt. The initial intent of this hunt was to run it for one week. It has been expanded to 4 weeks. So I'm thinking that having everyone put a second gift in the hunt globes in a week's time might be a good idea. Of course, that may also produce just a short burst and no sales, but if it's a smaller, slower flood running through, people may take more time to get there, especially since they already know where the globes are, or at least the LMs are. And if, the second wave generates more sales, perhaps a third wave would be worthwhile. But those are my thoughts, and not an official part of the hunt policy. But I thought you might like to know what I'm thinking about in regards to the hunt.

And now for the thanks. I'd like to thank the organizers of the Peace on Earth Hunt for giving us this chance. Whatever the outcame and through all the difficulties of this, they've done a great job herding cats and getting most of us to the starting line on time and doing the right things. There are a few that have escaped (nothing out, so you have to skip their sites) or haven't been doing things right (selling the globe, not the contents, or changing the name on the globe, so you have to go searching through your inventory to find it, etc.), but most of us were ready to go when the flag dropped.

And I'd also like to thank the nice bloggers at Freebie Telegraph for their kind review of our skin. It's the first review of any of our skins that's I've found online.

And, finally, I'd like to thank all of you for visiting this little blog and listen to me meander on about what we're doing and what's going on in SL. Thank you!

And Happy Holidays, whichever ones you celebrate!

On being a responsible modder

At this point in time, Colorskins is a skin-mod shop. What that means is that we have taken the templates that someone els provided (in our case, we use the Eloh Eliot templates) and we make changes to them to make something different than what was provided. These changes may be simple or complex. And sometimes the subtle differences are the most complex.

But what makes a responsible - one might almost say "ethical" - modder, is that the modder acknowledges that not all of what they've released isn't their own work.

Now, in our case, we always acknowledge that our current line of skins are based on the Eloh Eliot templates and we thank her for the help she's given us by releasing her templates for public use. The only restriction (beyond the GPL license she used) she's given on their use is that no-one is allowed sell them unmodified. I think that you can safely say that none of our skins are unmodified. What may not be so obvious is just how much work has gone into the versions we've been releasing.

First, you have to understand that the Eloh Eliot templates are different than most of the other templates that are available for purchase. All of the other templates we've looked at (though we haven't looked at all of them, so we don't speak for all of them) are basically three Photoshop files, each with a single layer that has all the parts on it. The Eloh Eliot templates have lots of layers, each with different pieces that go into making the skins. For instance, the female skins have at least 5 different layers that make up just the curve & shadows of the underside of the breast. And every single one of those layers has to be modified, every time you change the base color of the skin.

What this means is that for us to produce just one skin tone, we have to make hundreds of adjustments for them to look right. We've been very careful about tuning each skin to produce the best quality skins possible from these template. In fact, with all the work we've put into them, we like to think that we're producing better quality skins that the ones Eloh produced with the same templates.

In addition to changing the skin tones (as time consuming as that is), we've been producing specialty and limited edition theme skins with custom tattoos and colorations. And all of those have been our work, even when we draw inspiration from other art pieces. At no time do we ever use unmodified clip art and claim the work as ours.

However, one other thing that we've been doing is trying to move beyond just modding someone else's work. We're in the process of developing our own template, using the inspiration of Eloh's many-layered approach to build it up piece by piece. Of course, we've only recently started this process, so it will be some time before we're ready to release the first version of it, but that will give us plenty of time to finish coming out with all the men's skins as well as updating the women's skins.

Any way you look at it, we're going to have a busy year coming up. And thanks for putting up with us wandering all over the conceptual landscape today.

Starting in the middle

This blog probably should have been started a long time ago, since not only have we completed the initial releases of the women's skins, but we're partway through the initial release of our men's skins. That may be so, but at least we're starting things out now.

This week marks the start of the green skin releases with Celadon being the lightest color. We're following our usual pattern of starting with the lightest skin in the set being released first, with each subsequent release being the next darkest skin. This means that it will take us six weeks to release one complete base color set, after which we'll release the women's version(s). Green, Blue and Purple are the only skin sets left where we'll do a complete reset of the skins, as our method of building the skin color and tones was not well-refined, nor was it done the same way between colors. Yellow, Orange, Cyan and Magenta were all done the way we're doing things now, so they'll only have the new skin tone being added to what's already there. That doesn't mean there won't be changes in the remainder of the skins. We'll be updating the pictures of the other skins, so they're more in keeping with the new ones.

Well, that should do it for this first post. Leave any comments and questions you've got here or drop a notecard in one of our dropboxes inworld.