Tian Long Ba Bu (also known as TLBB), is a free-to-play MMORPG developed by ChangYou.com. During my time working for ChangYou, I worked as part of a small but dedicated team to completely overhaul the TLBB (EU) website. For my part, this meant re-writing web content from a poor quality Chinese translation in order to make it both more appealing and more relevant to European players. I also assisted in migrating content to a dynamic WordPress CMS to improve the workflow for content creation and display.
Unfortunately, tlbb-thegame.com no longer exists, as the EU office of ChangYou.com has since closed, however here are a few I did find…
From the menu down the left-hand side you can see a small glimpse at the scale of the work I completed in terms of new content creation. Each part of the game guide was written by myself from scratch, and typically included four to five pages of content. I also added my own creative input to the game guide, with expanded sections on each of the game’s character classes which include Assassins, Shaolin, Taoists and Lotus Order.
News posts and community events
Aside from overhauling the main TLBB website, with new guides, FAQs and so on, I was also responsible for creating compelling and interesting news items. These would range from ‘item of the week’ posts with a focus on increasing sales for a specific Token Shop item, to writing up community events and engaging the community with the game ‘lore’. One area I showed particular initiative with here was in developing community events together with the Community Manager, where players would appear in stories that featured on the main website. Community events would be tied together week-on-week by an overarching story created by myself that would give a context for events I would help run in-game alongside the Community Manager.
Newsletters
Working closely with Community, Marketing and QA departments, each month the Creative Services team produced a Newsletter sent out to players. Unfortunately I don’t have any examples to hand, however my friend and former colleague Marek Lenik has uploaded some examples to his own portfolio website. If you’re in need of a web designer / developer, Marek comes highly recommended.
Localised content
A final part to my web content related work at ChangYou was to work with QA and translation teams on localised content for Turkish and Russian versions of the TLBB website. This included news posts (written in English) that were translated ready for Open- and Closed-Beta stage versions of the site, as well as additional content for various mini-sites.