Hey everyone!

Here’s a poster giving some information on Kihara and Suwa’s guest talk at Akumakon! We have a special offer going on for people who’d be less interested in the convention but more in the guests as well. For a small fee of €5, you can get temporary access to the convention (from 2pm-6pm on Saturday) which includes the timing of this talk! Great for people who want to see these amazing guests but maybe don’t have time or interest for the rest of the weekend.

Also, we are organising a cosplay bus tour on the Monday after Akumakon! It will run from roughly 9am to 5pm, travelling our to the Cliffs of Moher and some other fantastic spots with good chances for photoshoots. Going on this will also give you a great chance to talk to our guests some more in a casual setting! But be aware, tickets are very limited and go on sale at Akumakon for just €10.

So guys, bit of big news for us. We have some official sponsors helping us out now! Ankama (http://www.ankama-group.com/en), creators of DOFUS (http://www.dofus.com/en) and WAKFU (http://www.wakfu.com/en/mmorpg) are now sponsoring us! We are so grateful to them for this, and it would mean a lot if ye could go and check them out!

Here’s a link to the DOFUS Facebook page and below is some of the latest news from them!

Major new contents in the World of Twelve this month:

Ankama is releasing KROSMASTER Arena, DOFUS update 2.9, and WAKFU update 1.9

Roubaix, France – 12^th December 2012. Yesterday, Ankama released DOFUSupdate 2.9 and KROSMASTER Arena, the first expansion shared by DOFUS and WAKFU. WAKFU update 1.9 will be released next week, on December 18^th.

• December 11^th:

DOFUS update 2.9 consists in the addition of important new functionalities that will considerably enhance players’ in-game experience:

• Achievement system: Achievements correspond to the hallmarks of a DOFUS characters’ life. They are organized in an interface and sorted by category (exploration, professions, quests, dungeons, etc) and the player receives rewards for each achievement they unlock. This system allows players to track their progress through the game and helps to introduce players to new challenges. It also allows players to display their knowledge and experience by showing their Achievement score.

• Character personalization: players will have several new options of character personalization at their disposal. More faces for more personal expression and more originality..

• New equipment: 24 new items of level 190 or more are introduced in the game (7 sets composed of 3 items, in addition to 3 new single items).

• Titles and Ornaments: a new interface dedicated to the management of Titles and Ornaments has been introduced.

• Maturing resources: a new system for harvestable resources that will ease exploration has been added.

• DOFUS client performances optimization.

In addition, Kwismas Island is also opening its gate to all players with dungeons, a petmount, quests and a lot more for players to enjoy. You can visit the dedicated page of the event on DOFUS.com.

KROSMASTER Arena Online is Ankama’s first expansion common to both DOFUS and WAKFU in which players can fight each other with Krosmaster figurines – effigies of heroes from the Krosmoz universe. KROSMASTER Arena can directly be launched from the MMOs, without leaving the games, and brings together all Ankama’s expertise in the domain of tactical turn-based strategy in a simple but fast game, with infinite possibilities. All players will start with a team of four standard Krosmasters that they will later be able to evolve using the virtual figurines unlocked in DOFUS and WAKFU (drop, exchanges). Ladder competitions will be organized on a regular basis and will oppose players, communities, and then DOFUS and WAKFU players. Discover more about KROSMASTER Arena in the MMOs by clicking the following links:

• KROSMASTER in DOFUS
• KROSMASTER Guide in WAKFU

You can watch the KROSMASTER Arena trailer by clicking this link, and to give a clear and smooth introduction of this brand new game, Ankama released a tutorial available here.  

• December 18^th:

WAKFU’s 1.9 update will bring important new contents:

• The Kwismas event: WAKFU is decking its halls with the colors of the holiday season with an exclusive island, its red and white monsters, two dungeons and a snowball battles mini game.

• 4 new Dungeons: the Hoodlums Dungeon for all nations (Lvl 60), the Molluskies Dungeon for Brakmar and Sufokia (Lvl 55), the Sharks Dungeon for Sufokia (Lvl 55), and the Cracklers Dungeon for Amakna (Lvl 55).

• Addition of environmental quests to the following zones: Sadida Forest, Kelba, Monk Island, and Forfut.

About Ankama

Ankama is an independent French group that works in the entertainment industry and bases its development on a transmedia strategy: online games, edition, animations, press, music, merchandise, games for next generation consoles and mobile devices. Ankama enriches its universe, the Krosmoz (to which DOFUS and WAKFU belong), through all these media to create a complete and immersive narrative experience. Ankama also supports artists, helping them bring their own worlds to life through screenplays, TV programmes, music albums or comic books. www.ankama-group.com

Mélaine Chabert

Marketing and Communication Officer

Ankama Games

press@ankama.com.

Awww yeah. Akumaday was a pretty amazing success! People seemed to enjoy themselves and we got a load of quality cosplayers down for some fun and dancing.

Big thanks to all who came and took the opportunity to prereg. Remember that prereg is still open until sometime in December. It’s cheaper than buying at the door and you get a t-shirt

Check out the photo album here and tag yourself or friends!

I’m bored and in a swag mood at the moment so here, have some swag me (Webmaster John comin’ at ya) to laugh at. Those MSPaint skills.

Of course this isn’t restricted to WordPress, there are other Content Management Systems (CMS) out there that do a better job while being more complex and designed for people who actually make websites. Joomla, Drupal (and I think there is another one called Eclipse) are all professional grade content management systems. I’ve tried Joomla and Drupal but they are a little too much for a person without any experience. WordPress on the otherhand, was designed to be simple, easy to use for people who just want to get their thoughts onto the internet. Need some functionality that doesn’t exist in WordPress? Add a plugin of which there are thousands.

So where is the actual learning? Well firstly you need to get the website up on the internet. Here in NUIG the hosting is provided by the college so all it required was getting the webmaster here to set me up with some space and a mysql database (This is where all the settings and information related to the website goes). You need to get a program to access the FTP (fancy name for the website folder on the server in the college) called Filezilla, then all that’s required is to download WordPress, extract it, and put it up on the server. Visit the website address and follow the instructions to install  WordPress. It’s that easy nowadays to make a website!

In the beginning we were given a domain name (http://akumakon.nuigalway.ie for anyone wondering, it should still lead here) but it is much nicer to have a proper one so I bought akumakon.com on Blacknight Solutions, an Irish website for buying domain names.

So what is left… well I found a nice theme and got our fabulous Art Director to EVENTUALLY make the website look pretty. After that it’s just personalising the website tbh. Adding a forum plugin, some things to make it easy to login via facebook and adding content. See any mention of coding there?

The point of this post is… well it’s quite pointless, however I hope i’ve inspired some of you to try making society websites or even realise how far programming has come that it is now possible to… well… not program anymore. Of course there are obvious benefits to making your own website but for getting started into the world of websites and the backend of things, it’s no longer as daunting a task as you may have thought!

P.S. I apologise profusely to all actual web designers out there. You guys are amazing and I envy you. So don’t look too harshly on this post of mine. It’s written from the point of view of a person who has no education in the subject and learned by doing and experimenting. It is not clean, it is a quick and dirty way of getting websites out there which you probably and rightly should despise, but keep up the good work all the same!

Here is something lighthearted that makes me feel better about the horror i’m about to witness…

I suppose I’ll start off by telling you what I do. I master the web… like a digital spiderman. In otherwords, I update, manage and edit the website and all other internet related things like the domain name, hosting (thankfully provided by the university here at NUIG for free), email addresses, preregistration and…. whatever else the committee tells me needs to be done

Over the coming days and weeks i’ll be posting up more information on how I operate, explain some changes in the website and talk about how we are progressing through the stages from ideas (coming to a stall soon) and starting to work on all those ideas to get them hammered into a planned event.

That’s all I have time for today, I suppose I’ll eventually come up with days i’m free to update this so I can get some kind of schedule going. For now, enjoy some english, russian and japanese singing.