Game talk

This is the catch-all category for stuff about games and game design. It easily makes up the vast majority of the site’s content. If you are looking for something specific, I highly recommend looking into the tags used on the site instead. They can narrow down the hunt immensely.

  • More on WebFlock

    Hours Categories Game talk

    For those curious about the tech behind the Electric Sheep’s WebFlock platform, here’s a glimpse from a comment posted on Clickable Culture:

    …the avatars are typically created in Maya or Max but they are rendered into sprites. That doesn’t prevent avatars from being individually personalized, but we haven’t finished that capability yet in our feature set.

    You can still have a very 3D feel with our rendering engine (less toylike than isometric in my opinion), but you don’t have full camera control. Personally, I think that is a feature you DON’T want right now (unless you are doing enterprise simulation/training or mirrorworld stuff) — if you’ve ever watched people try to learn the camera controls in your typical full-3D virtual world, it is sheer pain.

    The environments are also created in Maya or Max and then exported to Collada.

  • WebFlock

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 3 Comments
    WebFlock screenshot

    The Electric Sheep Company has launched WebFlock, which is an “under 100k/year” Flash-based solution for building white-label virtual worlds. ESC will do the hosting and presumably the work of making the world; their first customer is the TV show The L-Word.

    Many of the articles and commentary are comparing it to Lively, but the comparison seems wrong to me — Lively is aimed at end users making small spaces, whereas this seems more like it’s up against SmartFoxServer and ElectroServer as a white-label solution. It will fill a nice niche there, given the radically different style of the visuals — the other two seems to lean towards kids’ worlds.

    I would expect to see more adult IP (TV shows, movies, businesses) using this sort of platform for their virtual world presence, rather than embedding their presence inside of a single world.

  • Metaplace status update!

    Hours Categories Gamemaking
    Comments 2 Comments

    For those wondering what’s up with Metaplace, we have a July Update up on the company blog that should serve to catch you up. We’re really really busy these days, gearing up for going beta.

    We’ve seen some absolutely amazing work being created within Metaplace. We’ve had educational learning software, the start of basic RPG’s, an RTS, a beginning shooter game, arcade games, word games. We’ve seen people make procedurally generated maps, the start of standalone clients, and then all the games we’ve shown in our Community Spotlight posts. We’re consistently entertained by the creativity that is shown, and we are excited to see what you all can make.

    The post also has a short term roadmap, and lots more…


  • Second Skin

    Hours Categories Game talk, Watching

    I’m a day late on this, i think! But Second Skin is premiering in New York, and they want to sell tickets. 🙂

    Today’s the day!  Tickets have just gone on sale for the NYC premiere of our little documentary on virtual worlds, Second Skin.  We would love to have all of you there, and would be honored if you’d join us at our hometown premiere.  If we sell out this theater fast enough, we might get other NYC theaters to notice, and give us a good run- which would create a lot more press, and help us with our theatrical release later this year.

    If you could please BUY TICKETS HERE and forward this message along to *everyone* you know, we might sell out within the day- our humble goal.  Thanks to all of you for making  this movie such an unbelievable success.

    In case you’re new, here’s the skinny on our movie, below.  Also, watch out for us in next week’s issue of Newsweek and Moviemaker Magazine!

    Read More “Second Skin”

  • E3 MMO movement

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 7 Comments
    XBox Live avatars
    XBox Live avatars and new dashboard

    From here, it sure like the virtual world-ish convergence that has long been predicted is hitting the consoles in earnest.

    • XBox Live is adding avatars, akin to the Nintendo Miis, but it looks like they’ll have a bit more spatiality and multiplayer interaction to them — and will be the basic interface for XBL from now on. Oh, and remember when I commented that consoles were turning into PCs? They announced the ability to install games to the hard drive as a major advance. Heh.
    • Nintendo’s next Animal Crossing game is also drifting towards online-world land, though still not truly massive in scale.
    • Club Penguin is jumping to the Nintendo DS, and don’t underestimate Disney’s new DGamer service, which is intended to network all the Disney online properties.
    • Sony has a 256-player action game coming, which qualifies as “massive,” certainly, though perhaps not as presistent. They’re also adding more real-world integration, with stuff like movie and TV downloads, weather service, news, etc.