Are you ready to pay $2 for a new jacket for your Xbox 360 avatar? It’s coming this fall… and there will be more than just clothing, it seems:
The range of virtual goods Microsoft is rolling out for avatars includes branded apparel, animated items called props, and items only earned by playing specific games called “awardables.”
— Virtual Goods News: Microsoft To Launch Avatar Marketplace This Fall.
Is virtual item gifting far behind?
Rock Band® has announced that the game will support user-created tracks, creating a completely new indie distribution channel for musicians, one that potentially rivals iTunes in importance. They’re promising a cut of every sale, and help with promotion.
- Mix your multi track recordings.
- You will need to mix them to fit the standards for Rock Band.
- Create MIDI gameplay info.
- Reaper is a Digital Audio Workstation. We have been working with Reaper’s creators (Cockos, Inc.) to add a number of specific Rock Band Network additions that will make creating MIDI song information simpler and more intuitive. http://www.reaper.fm
- Create a song package with Magma.
- Magma is a PC tool that we are creating to allow authors to build Rock Band Network song packages.
- Audition your song package within Rock Band 2.2
- We will release a patch to Rock Band 2 that will enable “Audition Mode.” This will allow you to test out your song packages in game with features like speed up and slow down cheats and autoplay.
- Upload to creators.rockband.com for Peer Review
- Once your song is ready, upload it here. Other members of the community will try out your song, give you feedback, and submit reviews. Once your song has passed the review process, it is automatically approved for sale on Xbox Live.
- Sell your song on Xbox Live
- When the store opens, later this year, songs will be available for others to download via the RBN store ingame.
Probably the most interesting part is the mandatory peer review for publshing tracks up to the network. You’ll need to be a member of the XNA Creators’ Club to participate.
There’s a Wiki up with the full spec.
Just yesterday my new editor at OReilly asked me “is there anything that has made the content of A Theory of Fun in need of updating?” And my response was “no, not really…”
That’s because articles like this one keep coming out:
Further experiments on their brains revealed that that the same neurons were signaling the expectation of both water and knowledge, and they were linked to the release of dopamine–a neurotransmitter chemical that’s connected to making you feel rewarded when you achieve a goal.
And that’s incredibly revealing. Because it implies that the primal urge mechanisms that drive us to eat when hungry and drink when thirsty are also directly allied with seeking out new knowledge–it seems we’re actually programmed to gather information.
— Reading Fast Company as Rewarding as Sex, Study Suggests | Technomix | Fast Company.
Digging deeper to the source article shows that the key quote is this one:
…information about a reward is rewarding in itself.
This is awesome, and I will be signing up tonight and probably throwing one of my board game designs up there to try it out. 🙂 The short form: CafePress for board game designers.
Their brief FAQ covers the basics.
At TGC, you can start selling your game with only the push of a button. There are no up-front fees, no contractural obligations, no distributors, and you don’t need a big publisher to decide your game will sell 10,000 units in the first year.
TGC is your dream made simple!
Why TGC? We’ve been in the game design/manufacturing industry for over 10 years and published many of our own titles. We’ve always specialized in small run games, but we did it only for ourselves. Over the years we’ve gotten hundreds of requests from other indie designers asking if we’d publish their games, and finally we realized that our process could be applied to games other than our own as well.
Looks like they handle not just boards and cards, but also sell a nice assortment of parts that can go into the game. Not as wide an array as I have in my prototype kit, but decent nonetheless. 🙂
[mp2wp]Onehempcats_World,600,500[/mp2wp]
Stop by if you like! 🙂 And you can check out his music site here.
