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.
So this is a nice development: Project Darkstar, which is Sun’s online game platform, just went open source under GPL — the annoucement apparently happened today here at GDC. It’s a pretty robust solution — you can write clients in whatever, you can use stuff other than Java with it, and you can make darn near any sort of online game with it — yes, including MMOs. It’s interesting to see something this complete offered up open source to the general public.
Three Rings (puzzlepirates) income = $100K per month from subs. $250K from microtransactions.
Other tidbits from the casual games summit at GDC here:
# sessions attended: 0/8 POOR!
# interviews completed: 2/2 GREAT!
# planned meetings completed: 2/2 GREAT!
# chance meetings in the hallway that led to lengthy conversations: 5 BONUS!!
# Badges collected: Ben Ceverny, Sande Chen, Greg Boyd, Steven Davis, Gordon Walton, Darius Kazemi, Bob Bates, Jeff Ward, Steve Mereztky, Zack Karlsson, Chris Early, Marty Poulin, Andre Vrignaud
# alcohol intake: LOW
Game completion: 20%
Lives remaining: uncertain
Welcome to level 2.
The march of the branded worlds continues, as Lego taps NetDevil, makers of Auto Assault and Jumpgate, to create a virtual world about, well, Legos.
It should be interesting to contrast this to Roblox, which is, well, also an online block building environment.
BTW, I am here at GDC, and my schedule looks like hell. Constant meetings. We shall see how much blogging I manage to do. I did do an interview for f13 today, about the games biz and whatnot — and one for Business 2.0 about my laptop (hey, it’s for their “gear” section). Now I am off to dinner, which is another business meeting. I think I will barely get to go to any sessions. *sigh*
So supposedly everyone is trying to clone Second Life. Here’s word via Mobil Avenue on three different takes on the model, each trying to fix what they see as a key issue: HiPiHi in China, which looks like SL with easier tools; Planet Cazmo, which keeps the house decorating aspect but changes it into a browser-based Animal Crossing lookalike; and finally, reviews trickling out of the closed Kaneva beta, which is putting more MySpace peanut butter in your SL chocolate. Are they really SL clones?
