Community sites as games

The idea of using gaming concepts in community sites is a growing meme. Many of the successful sites like MySpace are using these very concepts to gain and retain users. Hmmmm.

Widge-ups? Widgets meet Mashups

What an interesting idea - take the concept of mash-ups and smush them down into widgets that are more interactive than just "show me the weather". How about games+widgets+mashups ? :D That's what I want to create.

Designing a MMORPG for the Casual Gamer

Interesting article about what is a casual gamer and how to create an MMO to accomodate that style of gamer.

Idea convergence

Gee, I've been blogging alot lately about my own projects. I'm sorry that it's not really ready for general consumption, but rest assured that eventually you'll see a nifty 2d tile based rpg engine that not only can you have interesting adventures in, but you'll be able to create your own and share them with other folks. Using a simple JSON script, you'll be able to post a "world" on any server and point to it from the game to play. You'll even be able to do "linked" worlds - from server to server.

I'm trying to figure out how to do multiplayer - with one idea being adapting this engine to the Yahoo plugin architecture. This is why it's suddenly making sense to do this in HTML - I can create an Opera widget easily, and most likely the Yahoo IM plugin would be pretty trivial (but Sweet!) to do as well. Imagine clashing swords with your buddies via IM and pillaging their stash of gold and weapons...

I'd give anything to have a few days off from real life to get something pulled together quickly. Between work and a baby on the way its basically nights and weekends when I'm not exhausted :)

Why did I title this "idea convergence?" Because there are so many things going on with casual games, mmo's , web 2.0 stuff, and ideas I've had for a long time that are coming together with this little silly rpg engine.

progress on rpg engine

I managed to make some real progress on my new rpg engine. I'm able to create a field of randomly generated tiles, which are all objects in my game world - the cool thing is it looks the same in FF, IE, and Opera (even widget version!). This shows some promise as something I can finally invest some serious dev time into and make it something more than just a test demo that all the other platforms turned into.

Joel's Thoughts on Casuality 2006

If you didnt get to go but wished you had - or if you are working on "casual" games - this is a good read.

working on an rpg engine

I've talked about MMO's for a while, and I've created simple rpg engines for XUL, Laszlo, Canvas, and even Konfabulator and I've always run into a "dead end" in that I've been creating this code for a very small audience. This time, however, I've realized that I can take what I've learned in those areas and create a good RPG engine using plain old HTML and Javascript - using the YUI utilities. This will be the platform which I use for my MMO as well as several other interesting projects. More news as it develops.

Flash Game: Block Action

From JayIsGames comes a very interesting flash game. The levels are generated by other players which makes for pretty much endless variations. Very interesting idea! :)

15 Things you can do with yahoo ui

From a fellow Yahoo! employee comes a great article about the kinds of things you can do with the Yahoo! UI libraries.

Eclipse 3.2 (Callisto) is out!

I used to be a die hard(est) dreamweaver user. I've used many text editors, ide's etc etc. and I've settled on Eclipse. For a while it was a hard sell, because eclipse has been kinda slow and didnt really have much in the way of tools for HTML developers. In the past year or so that's changed with third party plugin stuff like MyEclipse. However with the release of the Eclipse Web Tools I've finally reached editing heaven (well not quite yet, but at least at the pearly gates :) ). Callisto is Eclipse 3.2 and if you havent tried Eclipse now, its never been a better time to download it and try it out. It has a bit of a learning curve, but once you get over that - its very nice. I love the autocomplete --- you can autocomplete on CSS HTML and JS all in the same file. Great stuff!