Gamemaking

Wherein I talk about games I am making

Metachat launches on MySpace

 Posted by (Visited 7733 times)  Gamemaking  Tagged with: ,
Mar 132008
 

Metachat logoWow, it’s been a crazy couple of weeks.:)

We’ve said all along that Metaplace is a platform for making all sorts of virtual worlds. I know a lot of you are waiting for games written in it – specifically an RPG, probably. But well, games are hard, and they take time. And we didn’t see any reason to wait! So we decided that it was time to start releasing some of the worlds that have been made with Metaplace, and today we launched the first one – a simple chat room.

This is part of the OpenSocial launch on MySpace, so it’ll be interesting and exciting to be in the first wave of apps… as of right now, we seem to be the #1 app. Of course, it just launched a few minutes ago. 😉 I fully expect to get overtaken any second now by Flixster…

There’s a more detailed post on this over at the Metaplace website, including some implementation tidbits.

If you have a MySpace profile, you can hit the apps page to add it, or visit Metachat directly.

Metaplace Stress Test: a 2d space shooter

 Posted by (Visited 5960 times)  Gamemaking  Tagged with:
Mar 072008
 

Here we go, stress test number three! Stuff is starting to accelerate quite a lot here as we gear up for releases. So we’re doing another stress test. This one is for an overhead 2d space shooter that you may have seen screenshots of before. This intent this time is to stress test with some physics and a really bandwidth-intensive game. We’ve also worked some on optimizations and on browser compatibility since last time, so we’ll see how that does. We really hope we manage to break stuff this time!

You don’t need to be an alpha tester to play. Just visit the main Metaplace page at noon Pacific time tomorrow, and there will be a link to the game.

Metaplace’s public debut

 Posted by (Visited 9461 times)  Gamemaking
Jan 312008
 

Edit: in case it wasn’t clear — this was a “sneak preview” sort of thing; we are not live to the public, it was just for a few hours. 🙂

Well, we didn’t make a big deal about it, but Metaplace has now officially been played by actual players, and not alpha testers. Today we did a dev chat using Metaplace itself as the platform for the IRC-like text chat, and in the middle of it we also showed off a little bit of a more graphical space with avatars. It was a chance to both talk to folks and also to shove a high number of people at the server and client, including guest logins, to try to stress things a bit.

It all went spectacularly well, too. We expected things to blow up, but nothing did. Extremely low CPU usage, even with over 80 simple avatars walking around and chatting in one relatively small space (small enough that there was no real network culling going on). That’s a decent achievement for any virtual world system. 🙂 Bandwidth was a bit high, but we know things to work on there that are easy big gains. Seems like fairly few weird browser issues — which is easily the biggest bugaboo with doing something so Web-based. I have seen that a few folks failed to get in at all, and we’ll try to track down why…

We’ll be posting the official chat log with our next blog post, probably. But in the meantime, a few of the VW-centric news sites were in:

Our friends over at the Electric Sheep were also on hand. And of course, there’s blogs by bunches of folks who attended, like TBowl, Feeding Change, Oh No, Aliens!, Cooking XP, and Dr. Offset’s. Edit: Dr. Offset’s has a little bit more, and there’s Emergent Future’s take here.

A couple of those have pics of the (brief) graphical demo. Everyone’s only one avatar… we’ll have to save character customization for another day. 😉

Another Escapist interview, Metaplace chat

 Posted by (Visited 6718 times)  Game talk, Gamemaking
Jan 292008
 

I did another Escapist Interview, all about Metaplace this time. Which suggests that I should point out that there’s a live chat happening soon:

Thursday, January 31 at 5:00pm Pacific Standard Time. You probably want to update your Flash player to the latest version.

More details are here.

…all professional game developers were once users. It’s not like some magic switch gets flicked the minute that they become a pro that makes their stuff good, and we’ve all played pro stuff that wasn’t that good. There’s just a spectrum, from good to bad, and whether or not people are pro or amateur has nothing to do with that quality line. The pros tend to get access to money and the good guys tend to gravitate toward being pros, but it doesn’t mean that an amateur cannot make good content. Maybe they’re just a hobbyist, maybe they’ve never had tools that were good enough, maybe they’ve never been given a chance.

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