A post celebrating Brick Hill's 5th Anniversary as well as revealing the future of Brick Hill by highlighting new exciting updates and changes.
Maxed1, Brick Hill
• 19 min read
Happy anniversary, Brick Hill! We've enjoyed five years of an optimistic and engaged community, and with recent commitments to pursuing an even better future with the advent of a robust new client it feels only natural for our platform to evolve and grow into itself through our website and branding.
Not only do we have a great new logo to identify ourselves, we've also upgraded each of the eight default shirts that you'll have received one of when you signed-up! This is all in an effort to push Brick Hill into its own space as an emerging platform.
We've done our best to mix in a fresh design with a reminder of our origins because we love every aspect of our vision and our journey from our very beginnings, up to right now, and then travelling into the future.
The Next Chapter
As many of you will have noticed, pages have been incrementally transforming to a new generation of the site. This is part of a larger project to completely rework the avatar customization that we offer, which includes our entire shop system and subsequently trading and trade-able items.
These are huge steps forward in developing our platform, so take a deep breath and keep scrolling to learn about the biggest game-changers that will undoubtedly revolutionize your experience!
Reinventing Customization
Our brand new shop smashes together the composition of our current and former shop layouts for a range of compatibility - particularly with search parameters and sorting through categories in the shop.
Looking hard enough, you'll see that we've introduced item tags, the ability to search for designers (that is, searching for all items created by a user), and a bunch of checkboxes down the side - some helpful, and some mysterious - such as "verified designers only."
This is because clothing designers now have the opportunity to have their work recognized, protected, and promoted by us! If you're serious about making and selling clothes on Brick Hill then you'll love this - by specifically searching for clothes made by verified designers, all of the spam and chaos of the shop is minimized to provide you with only the coveted, bona-fide quality clothing produced by our verified designers.
This also gives you additional fields to tag your items; such as adding them to collections, giving them aesthetic tags (such as cyberpunk or cottagecore), and even a direct gateway to designing official assets like faces or hats and a voice in carving out the future features that we will introduce to the shop.
Applications to enter this program will open with this update, so keep an eye out!
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Move the layers above!
Behold, perhaps one of the most exciting features of this update - layered clothing! You'll now be able to combine your clothing in exponentially more ways and make the most of your wardrobe.
The limits of shirts, pants, and t-shirts are being removed and instead combined into one conglomerated template that we'll be using to upload clothes from now on. This is because with layered clothes this hierarchy is no longer necessary as you can decide your own, and it also means you can wear many more than just three combinations: buy one jacket, a shirt, and a hoodie and you've suddenly got fifteen new assortments rather than what is currently just three (or six if you consider one to be a t-shirt).
Future updates will push this technology further to be able to customize individual limbs and apply multiple colors to a single body part, but these will be introduced in later releases.
Updates that Jefemy and our client developer have been working on with avatar rendering also open up the possibility for many more avatar features! Soon you'll start seeing different body-parts, animations and emotes for your character (finally fixing Patient Zero,) as well as particle and sound emissions for some accessories. And at long last we're able to place hats correctly onto the assortment of wacky heads in the shop!
With this you are now presented with the ability to find items that are part of series, and we have decided to let you wear older versions of some items that have since been updated. A great example of an item utilizing each of these features is the "Chicken Hat" as you can see a list of each of its associated items as well as older versions that you'll be able to wear (though we really hope you don't use the last one).
Accessing these in the avatar editor is as easy as using the drop-down provided, and the introduction of tags diminishes the head-scratching credited to trying to remember the name of "Samurai of The Golden Eclipse."
Patient Zero Variants
*Not on-site depictions
Exploring A New Look
Whoa, new avatars? This has been promised since Brick Hill first entertained the possibility of revamping the platform, and in spite of last year's April Fools', we now feel that we're in a comfortable position to tackle this.
While far from its final rendition, we'd love to hear your feedback on these three default avatar models so far - in order to fine-tune it into three versions that the majority of you are happy with! This bouncing back-and-forth between you, the user, and our designers will continue before the final version is actually rolled out to the site though, so you've still got a few more months with your little blocky companion.
Into Trading
And to all of you merchants and serial-snipers, there's news for you too! Trading is as incorporated into the shop as customisation, so we're bringing many of the analytics formerly tucked away in APIs directly onto the site and special pages themselves, so you've now got one place to access all kinds of information - value history, active and hoarded stock, owner history, and more!
In an effort to make trading safer and discourage malicious behavior, a warning will also be applied to accounts that have been banned for trade-related activity, both within 30 days of a ban and for a full year after an offense.
If you're tired of trade offers for an item that's not leaving your inventory or you're sick of trading in general then you'll be pleased to hear that marking items as "for trade" and "not for trade" are now options - bumping items to the top of your inventory and hiding them altogether respectively. You can also disable all trade offers and block specific users from sending you any if necessary.
As a footnote on the trading update, every item page has a new "wishlist" button, which lets users see what items you're after - whether that means putting it in a trade or even gifting you the item!
What's Next?
We are not stopping here. As the year continues we'll keep updating chunks of the site, each with as much thought and consideration for how you will make the most out of it. Below is a rough game-plan for what you can expect next:
Social Update
Our next update is an adventure into making everything social about Brick Hill easier and friendlier to use. This includes rehauls to clans, forums, private messages, user feed, friends, and other major changes to come!
Moderator Update
Brick Hill is stepping up its moderation tools to be more efficent and helpful for Brick Hill in an update that'll include better tools for admins, reports, inappropriate content detection, art fraud detection, and other tools!
Games Update
Brick Hill's New Client is gearing closer and closer to release!With its release the site will see new updates; including a new developer library for models, stickers, audios, and other resources, as well as more updates to the games page including specific server details and gamepasses.
(Stay tuned for a blog post coming soon about the New Client!)
That is all for now! We hope you're as excited for the future of Brick Hill as we are, stay tuned for more information and announcements whether it be the new site or new client! Thank you for the last five years of Brick Hill, we're more than ready for five more!
