Flash MMORPG update - Unlimited Realms

I'm working in earnest to get a bare bones alpha version of this game going soon. Here's some of the thoughts I have about it:

1) MUD - many of the things you might have enjoyed about MUD's will be here, including creation of items, creating your own house/environment, and more.
2) Pets/Golems - one of the coolest ideas so far I've been toying with are Golems. These will be little automatons which will be hooked into things like FOAF, RSS, and more. Youll be able to create Golems to send message to friends, or to retrive news or other information
3) Metadata -- here's one of the BIG ideas for this game --- it will have an open API just like del.icio.us or technorati. YOu'll be able to hook up other services into this game, as well as pull information about your player into other services.
4) Chat - of course, you'll be able to talk to other players - duh
5) Killing monsters - yeah but here's the thing, if you want, you can play the role of the monsters too.
6) Lairs -- if you want to be a bad guy, you'll be able to create lairs which can trap/kill/rob from other players - but only if they want to enter your world.
7) connected worlds. If you want to set up your own world server, you'll be able to, except that you have to leave your stuff behind when you go - no cheaters.
8) Laszlo connectivity -- this game will probably use just about every feature Laszlo has to offer, and probably more.
9) Fantasy worlds -- you will be able to go off and explore worlds of fantasy -- and not kill a thing if you dont want to. Take some friends along with you.

The Incredibles - incredible!

I just got back from watching the Incredibles with my wife and kiddos. I must say I really really liked this movie. It's so past time for movies that are encouraging, promoting family, and are just plain fun. The best part of the movie for me was when the kids start discovering their powers, and are free to use them for the first time. There's just something really great about how the family goes from being repressed by conformity into finally expressing themselves. Anyway, it's fun, and I highly recommend it to anyone, not just kids.

Playing Scaler

Good morning! Just spent some time playing a pretty fun game called Scaler on XBOX - think Jak and Daxter, only... you're just Daxter... and ... you're blue. Anyway if you like platformers, and enjoy playing something that's NOT just a rehash of an existing franchise, give this game a go.

OpenLaszlo Roadmap

From the site:

Welcome to the first version of the Laszlo development roadmap! This document describes the short-term strategy, and the long-term vision, for the Laszlo open source platform.

This document, like OpenLaszlo.org itself, is a work in progress. Over time, we will move our project plans to a place where you can see them. For now, here's a sketch of where we are, and where we're going.

Not at BloggerCon

Hello there, my name is Andrew Wooldridge and I'm not at BloggerCon today. Why? Well let's see there's work, family, lack of time, blah blah , yadda yadda. When I discover events like this, where I just know that cool things are going to happen, and I know my participation in them will consist of reading random posts from various attendees, I get that same feeling I had when I was a kid riding in my parents car on a long trip. Do you remember pressing your face to the car window, seeing some fair or carnival pass by on the side of the road, and just knowing that you'd have the time of your life there, but as you turn to your parents they say "sorry, we have important things to do". You slump back down in your seat, bottom lip out, and dream about the day you can grow up and get to do the things you want to do. Hah :)

Well, it's not that bad. I'm sure if I had wanted to, I could have upheaved my life and made a way to be there. Instead, I'll take the time I am given and try to build some cool things of my own, then when it's time for the proverbial "show and tell" for me, I'll have more than just a GI Joe action figure to show...

LaszloMail -- Oddpost killer?

Laszlosystems is kicking butt and taking names lately - and this is yet another great move on their part. I've seen a demo of this application, and it's sweet. It behaves like you would imagine a mail app should, and it's free from all the browser incompatibilites. What's even sweeter is any ISP or net provider can get a version of this and resell it as a feature of their service... Look out Oddpost, here here comes LaszloMail.

A plug for RealBasic

I really like RealBasic - I've been toying with this IDE for years, and for a while I was seriously developing apps on it. Since then, the web has sucked away all my time, with it's HTML, JS, and CSS - however whenever I get back to building a standalone application, RealBasic will be the IDE I pick up. The fact that I can create something on my Windows XP box, try it out on my OSX box, then send it also to my Linux friends is pretty powerful. This is a tool that is super easy to use, has alot of power, and is simply well designed. The code hints it gives you as you type is simply awesome and I wish I had that feature for my other tools. I created a few RB projects in the past, and I always mean to start up development again... but meanwhile you should give it a shot, if just to have fun with the great interface. Plus you can have an app up and running in minutes.

Mini Game Review - Frenetic

It took me several hours to find this game. I had played it about a year and a half ago and promptly forgot about it in the crush of "the next great link". However, I always come back to something good eventually, so here I am. You start off appearantly as somone who's survived a spaceship crash and you have control minimally over a set of robots which you have to take into battle and basically shoot everything that moves. It's pretty brainless fun, and there's options for beefing up your robot's weapons and armor that is somewhat interesting. One note for you in terms of gameplay, once you discover that you can strafe via holding the shift key, the gameplay improves quite a bit - simply get the enemies in front of you and shoot like crazy...

I encourage you to try out the other game there as well - aptly called Fenix Blade - it's a wonderful home-grown rpg.

Game Preview - Outpost Kaloki

Ok, first off, I dont dig resource management games like "sim theme park" or "zoo tycoon". The idea of juggling resources and trying to handle many elements at once just doesnt do it for me when playing a game. Booring. That said, this game is refreshing, fun, funny, and downright addicting. You are a dashing space hero who is helping save the princess while running a space station. I guess this could easily have been named "Space Station Tycoon" but it would probably be misleading. If you enjoy easy to pick up games which you can learn in 5 mins but still feel challenged, I encourage you to give this one a try.

Using the laszlo framework as a standalone application

There's alot of buzz about the effort going on to get the results of your Laszlo development working as a standalone app. Here's one article I found recently about one person's efforts to do just that. Give it a read...

Bouncing back

Life's bouncing back in many ways, including the traffic on this site :) I had an all time high back in January, and I bottomed out in September down to like 1 hit a day. I fully intend to reverse this trend in a big way with games, web design stuff, ideas, and other fruity goodness. No more silence for me.