Steampunk Road Dispatch

I was recently reminded of Google Trends, an interesting way to gauge interest in topics around the world. If you were concerned that Justin Bieber’s “Santa Claus Is Coming To Town” video would be the death of steampunk, you need no longer worry. Although interest peaked temporarily around October of 2012, Google is predicting a rebound and potentially some additional growth among continuing enthusiasm.

Click here to see the full report. Select “Forecast” to see the future!

Oh, and if you are wondering why there are repeating peaks in October, I have one word for you: Halloween. The number one related search term is “steampunk clothing”.

It is our hope that the forums of Steampunk Road become a vital and thriving part of the game; a place where your persona and creativity can really come to the fore and shape this world. Here are some guidelines to help make it so.

The forums are divided into three categories. There is one category reserved for official communications and help for the game. The other two categories are for in-character interaction and real-world interaction.

It is natural to wonder what your fellow captains plying the road have to say about the latest events in the real world, but only posts firmly rooted in the game world and delivered in your avatar’s persona should be placed in the in-character interaction category. All other posts should go into the real-world category.

Also, please consider Steampunk Road to be the equivalent of a PG-13 rated environment. (Note: Steampunk Road has not been rated by any outside agency or ratings service.) There are filters in place to discourage the use of potentially offensive words. Please do not try to circumvent the filters with creative spelling, spacing, hyphenation, etc. Posts using such devices should be reported and will be deleted. Please respect the intent of the filters.

Although crude language is discouraged, we are big fans of creative cursing and innuendo. Make it inventive and humorous. As a good general rule of the Steampunk Road: Be Creative!

We are using the royal “we” here, because Steampunk Road is a project of Mark A. Durham (aka “Red Quark” in-game). I have had lots of inspiration, encouragement, support, and even assistance from others (see the About page), but ultimately everything about Steampunk Road is my responsibility. I should note though that all of the graphical assets (other than avatars, which are uploaded by the people playing the game) are derived from public domain and share-with-attribution images (see Assets), due to my limited funds, time, and graphical abilities.

A little bit more about me: I have been programming computers since the original Apple ][, have programmed all types of devices from the TI-55 to mainframes to robots to iPads and everything in between. I have also programmed in more computer languages than I care to count.

When I am not programming, I teach math and physics. I also write music, ranging from symphonic orchestral pieces to pop music songs. I have also written quite a bit over the years for newspapers, newsletters, magazines, and web sites. In many ways, I am a “Renaissance man” (or perhaps just a Jack-of-All-Trades and Master of Science).

As exciting as all of that is, I am not truly happy unless I am creating something, or learning something, or preferably doing both. That is why I set out to make Steampunk Road. I hope ultimately that you will enjoy playing in it as much as I have creating it.

The idea of Steampunk Road started to germinate about two years ago as Thomas Dolby’s A Map of the Floating City online alternate reality game was nearing its completion. A goal of Steampunk Road is to take technological elements of AMotFC and reuse them (and hopefully improve upon them) to create a new game. These include the Google Maps API, forums, trading, and chat.

Other than that, the two worlds are only connected by the fact that many of our earliest travelers are from AMotFC. That includes our most intrepid traveler, Calvin Hobbes, whom you can find most every day traversing our map in his gondola.

Oh, and there is one more thing from AMotFC: the curious artifact found at “the top of the world”. Have you found it on the map? That particular item was inspired by our experiences in A Map of the Floating City, where they could be found in abundance.

Hint: The item in question is easier to find on the public map. You need to zoom in quite a bit to see it there, and you need to zoom in all the way to maximum zoom to see it on the game map. Be sure to click the exclamation point when you see it in order to reveal the artifact.

It has always been a goal of Steampunk Road to support mobile devices like smartphones. Currently, there have been few accommodations made for touchscreen devices, devices with small screens, or both. The urgent question is:

Should Steampunk Road go mobile sooner or later?

Here are the possibilities as we see them:

• Maintain the status quo with a strong emphasis on finishing the game for desktop browsers
• Keep the priority of finishing the game, but devote a significant effort toward small-screen browsers on m.SteampunkRoad.com
• Make mobile a priority and get mobile right by providing dedicated Android and iOS apps before finishing the game

Please give us your feedback on this question and these options: either here in the comments, in the forums, or preferably in this survey. Most importantly, if you won’t play the game at all unless you can play it mobile, please let us know. Thank you for your time and assistance!

In Steampunk Road, you create a persona and travel the world. You can create any kind of character you like, but we have a suggestion: Be nice to your fellow players.

Now, perhaps your preferred persona is just not a nice person. That is fine. There is nothing wrong with that. Almost everyone likes a good villain.

But people only like a good villain in so far as they are not the unfortunate victim of his or her evil deeds. Whereas you might find it fun to be mean and annoying, others may just experience the mean and annoying parts without the fun.

So use your creativity instead and reveal your character’s nefarious flaws in ways enjoyable to everyone. If you can’t do that, please choose a persona that is nice and helpful instead. Thank you!

P.S. Steampunk Road strives to provide ways for players to easily report other players’ misconduct. Please make use of them whenever appropriate.

We can’t define “steampunk”, but we will still say a little bit about the universe of Steampunk Road. It is a time of global peace, when people are free to travel the world and trade. It is a world technologically ruled by steam: steam engines, steamships, and even steam-powered airships. Every object is a hand-crafted piece of art, finely tuned to its purpose.

But it is also a world you can help build. Create a persona, choose your vessel, and travel the world. You can collect treasure and trade with other fellow travelers. You can form a guild and compete for members. If you have not already entered the world of Steampunk Road, then register today.

Steampunk Road has the ability to launch vessels on random voyages. We use this ability to make the public map more enticing to potential new members. If you do not wish to be launched randomly around the globe, the solution is very simple: login. Only vessels of captains who have not logged in over the past ninety (90) days are considered inactive and randomly launched.

If you do not mind your vessel traversing the map but you do not want the email notifications of docking and welcome messages that come with it, you can turn those off in the “Settings” menu. Of course, you have to login to do that, so you will be safe from random launches for a time anyway. Still, the options are there should you anticipate being away from the game for a long period of time (which we hope you never will).

Welcome to the Steampunk Road Dispatch! This is the place for all of the latest missives from and about the Steampunk Road – everything from tips about how to play … to pleas for assistance … to rants about programming – a real potpourri of prose, and maybe even some occasional verse.

“What is Steampunk Road?” you ask.

Steampunk Road is an online alternate reality game (ARG) set in a steampunk^* universe where you can travel the world as captain of the vessel of your choice, discover hidden treasures, trade with fellow members, form a guild and compete for members, find a missing boyfriend, and reveal a global conspiracy of epic proportions. Register to begin your adventure today!

If you have a question about Steampunk Road or a suggestion for a future topic here on the SRD, please leave it in the moderated comments below or in the forums. Thank you for reading.

^*Steampunk is a little harder to define, and we do not think we can do it justice. Consider the word blue. Blue is a color, and many things are blue, but no one thing is definitively blue. You can also feel blue, sound a blue note while playing the blues, and talk a blue streak. Steampunk is a lot like that, with as many definitions as people who use it. Here is one slightly less evasive definition.