Realm Crafter: Create your own mmo

While you are waiting with baited breath to take part in the grand experiment that is metaplace, you might check out this software that enables you to create a simple 3d mmo.

Mythos: MMO from the Creators of Fate!

I stumbled across this this morning in one of my forums. The amazing creator of Fate has moved to Flashship Studios and is working on a casual MMO. Visit the site to sign up for the beta and check out the screenshots. Excellent!

Edit: I guess it would help to add the link...

Adrian's Guide to 2007 Freeware Games

This is an incredible list of freeware/indie games released so far in 2007. The amount of work and innovation to be found there is immense. You will be doing yourself a great disservice if you dont hop over there and check out the games. Most have screenshots and reviews.

Metaplace Wiki Opens

The Metaplace Madness continues. Now there's a Metaplace wiki for you to check out and contribute any tidbits of information you might have gleaned from the web on Metaplace. How fast a community can be created when a good idea emerges.

Metaplace.info - 3rd party Metaplace Fansite

It hasn't been more than a few days since Metaplace was announced and already there's a fansite with forums and other stuff up. I love the internets.

Maid Marian MMORPG - Shockwave Based MMO

From the site:

Welcome to Club Marian, a massive multiplayer social hangout where users from around the world can chat, dance, drive and create music in a fun 3d environment. Club Marian features three islands to explore, a cool music maker, emotes, customizable avatars and a sports car to drive.

Gamma 256 Game Contest

From Inverted Castle comes word of a new indie game making contest over at Kokoromi.org called Gamma 256. Some info from the site:

Between now and November 1st, 2007, create a game with the smallest and/or most irregular aspect ratio you can dream up. And then on November 28th, we’re throwing a giant party for your game, in Montreal.

Second Life: Standards for Interconnecting Worlds

So Second Life is proposing an "open" specification for interconnecting virtual worlds. I find it interesting that such things are being talked about in light of other virtuals worlds starting up across the web. It still seems very Second Life centric - more like a spec to link 3rd party servers to Second Life.

DOSBox an x86 Emulator - updated

DOSBox is an excellent tool for bringing back to life old games and other old DOS apps you might have lying around. It appears that they've updated the codebase a bit with new fixes and features. If you were looking for a way to run some old DOS apps, this is by far the best way to do that.

More Metaplace Madness: Demo Video at Cuppycake.org

Cuppycake.org links to a great video demo of Metaplace. It offers a tantalizing look at some actual game screens and UI. It's hard not to be enthusiastic about this site. After being disappointed by games over time you always want to keep your expectations low so you are always pleasantly suprised. I have a feeling that this place will live up to expectations and most likely exceed them.

Thoughts on MetaPlace

Now that I've had some time to digest the news about Metaplace, I wanted to post a few of my own thoughts about this upcoming games service.

The first thing that struck me about this is that Koster and folks forgot to mention the fact that they are in reality building 2 game experiences in one. The first game experience you'd have is the one where you log into a created world and explore that world's rules, earn points or whathaveyou and basically progress in the game. There is - however - another game lurking in there - and I'll bet they are as much aware of this game as they are of the "made" games. The very act of creating a world is going to be a game as well. You'll "level up" as you earn more skills in creating worlds and knowledge of the scripting language, you "earn points" by having a higher ranked world, and you'll have tons of fun playing with new objects or explore what new features others have come up with.

The second thing that struck me about this site is the possibility of having mmo's that are nothing like the dungeon quests we typically see. Imagine games where you play office politics, or everyone is a stuffed animal in some child's playroom ala Toy Story, or imagine a game where it's just you and a very sophisticated NPC - where you have to explore the psyche of a person instead of a dank dungeon.

I really hope that the inheritance of elements is more than just whole worlds. There could be another game aspect where you become really good at crafting NPC's or creating spaceships, or you are good at creating moody levels. I could see folks making a 'living' creating virtual items or gameplay components in this game. Here's to hoping :)

Metaplace Unveiled - GigaOm

My Metaplace fanboyism continues. I found a great article about it over on GigaOm. It provides a few more details of this intriguing new site.

VentureBeat talks about Metaplace

Here's another article discussing Metaplace. I have high hopes. We can only wait and see - it could be totally awesome.

Crunchbase on Areae

I suppose they are demoing Areae at TechCrunch40 right now because Crunchbase is listing it in their database now:

Areae's Metaplace platform wants to revolutionize the virtual worlds space. Their platform will provide an open, easy-to-use interface which will allow users to create virtual worlds that can run anywhere. Metaplace-created virtual worlds will be robust with users being able to play games, socialize, create content and conduct commerce.

Most virtual worlds are walled gardens making it hard to get data in and out of the worlds. Metaplace-created virtual worlds can be embedded into your Facebook page, MySpace page, or your own blog via a flash-based client widget. Every world is indexed, tagged and rated by users on the Metaplace portal, so virtual worlds in the Metaplace network can be easily linked together.

TechCrunch 40

If you are looking for some of the latest and greatest up and coming innovative sites of the coming year, then check out the emerging sites listed here.

Breaking News: Areae's Metaplace Announced

I just went by Areae.net's site and found that they are going to start talking about their new project Metaplace. Looks like the site will have some new information today at 4pm PDT. If you are curious about the future of mmo's then you'll be there waiting when the clock clicks over.

Million Dollar Idea: Virtual Goods meets Real Goods

There's no link for this post - although I wish there was. I had another epiphany of sorts. There are all kinds of sites coming out like Areae that represent this merger of Web 2.0 and MMO's. There are also sites like Ponoko where you can take digital designs and create real world items. My idea is to take these both to a new level by combining them. Imagine if you are in some virtual world / game where you are either creating new virtual items, buying them or winning them in some way. You then could trigger a process where that item is translated into a design document format, sent to a system like Ponoko, and out pops a real life version of your item! You might become an expert "virtual craftsman" who makes real money of the creation in real materials of your virtual item.

3D Total - the CG Artists Home Page

There is enough eye candy here to last you for weeks if not more. There are great 3d renderings, movies, and other things to show of the state of the art of Computer Graphics.

Ponoko: create and sell stuff

This is truly a cool and unique website. With all the noise about "making" things and "Fabbing", this site is taking this to a new level by creating a platform that anyone can "make" stuff on. From the site:

Ponoko is the world's first personal manufacturing platform. It's the online space for a community of creators and consumers to use a global network of digital manufacturing hardware to co-create, make and trade individualized product ideas on demand.

The ponoko.com marketplace connects creators, consumers, digital manufacturing hardware and service providers to promote, make and trade products on Ponoko and social networking websites.

Waaaay cool.

Realius - Fantasy Real Estate

Realius is a site featuring casual web based games around the process of purchasing real estate. I assume it'll be like fantasy football, only with... houses.

How to Create Levels for Knytt Stories

If you have fallen in love with Knytt Stories, as many folks probably have, you'll really enjoy this quick tutorial on how to create your own Knytt levels.

Buddy Labs - cute 3D avatars

While really useless, these avatars are pretty cute. Perhaps someday someone will attach intelligence to something like this and you'll get a little online pet.

Total Klik - indie games

Klik & Play is a tool that allows non-programmers and expert-programmers alike to create fun games - often used in the indie gaming scene. This site give you news of events and new games in the Klik world.

JSON - Based Cookies

This is a really nice and convenient javascript library to load and store data into a cookie and mirror via JSON. I had been looking for a cross browser way to save preferences, and this is an excellent option!

IttyBittyRPG - Mark II

I've had a bit of a epiphany with regards to ittybittyrpg - a way to make it very simple, fun, and embeddable to just about any website. So I'm going to see if I can get something working here in a few days. If so you'll see IBRPG on this blog...

Crafting in Real Life: Trinketing

I have an idea about taking crafting in games and applying it in real life.
I've played several RPG's where you have an aspect of the game focusing on "crafting". Crafting is simply a system where you can take basic elements you find in the game such as "wood" or "metal" and create higher level things like say a "hammer". You can also do the reverse and take a complex item such as a sword and reduce it to metal, leather, and jewels perhaps. Trinkets are things you can create that serve some simple purpose like say decoration, or weapons, or whathaveyou.

My idea is this: create a universal system for creating based components of a "trinket" system. This trinket system would allow you to do anything from creating a ring that blinks a light to a crude mp3 player. Building blocks looking like tiny lego-ish pieces that can simply be assembled in different ways which contain chips, power, logic, or mechanical functionality would be available to anyone who wants to "trinket". Anyone could create new base items but they'd need to be certified to work with the "system" meaning they have to adhere to certain standards like USB or something.

I think this could be really fun and interesting. It'd be like grown up legos with real functionality that could be shared with other folks. You design a cell phone with trinket pieces and post the instructions on the net and now everyone can create a cell phone... It'd be very interesting and links up with the FABBING meme that is going around the net.

Knytt Stories - indie adventure

Lost Garden talks about a wonderful new indie game out called Knytt Stories. It's a 2-D platformer that is highly accessible to many types of gamers. Check it out!

Snitter Alpha: AIR Twitter App from Snook.ca

This is an AIR powered application for Twitter. From the site:

There are plenty of people who've built Adobe AIR-powered applications for twittering but they still never had the features I wanted. So, I built my own. This gave me an opportunity to get what I was looking for while getting a chance to check out Adobe AIR.

Vastpark: 3D Worlds for Everyone

Vastpark is a system for creating 3D worlds for game developers, business folks, or just about anyone. These worlds are supposedly linkable so you could travel from one to the other in an unlimited 3D space.

Sounds very cool!

The Singularity Summit 2007

This conference held just this current weekend was regarding the "singularity" - that special moment when computers attain an intelligence surpassing our own - and subsequently create intelligences surpassing that, etc etc. in a sort of runaway series of advances on top of advances. It had an interesting list of speakers and such, and I wish I had known about it in time to go... Ah well check out the site if you are interested in AI and ALife.

Limitless Quest update

Not much to report as I've been reworking the code from scratch. The good news is that you'll have an in-place editor, save, load, and other great features. The bad news is that it's taking forever since I have so little spare time. I'd do alot just to have a whole weekend to work on this. I'm sad that I couldnt get it whipped into shape for the Adobe Developer Derby. I suck...

Away 3D Flash Engine - Now With Physics!

Check out this awesome demo of physics in the Flash based 3D engine Away 3D.

Chatopica: Flex-based chat for your blog

I can imagine folks who might want to use this flex widget to enhance their blog- it is a chat app which shares the "topic" with everyone else using the widget. Check it out - it is pretty slick.

ExpertRIA - amazing flash/flex/air developer

Shunjie Hu is an amazing Actionscript and Flex developer who's been working on some really cool AIR applications. Every once in a while you run across a rockstar programmer, an he's definitely one when it comes to Adobe tech.

Degrafa - declarative graphics in Flex 2

Here's an excerpt from the site:

The focus behind the Declarative Graphics Framework (Degrafa) is to bring the graphics classes up a level to provide a common ground between developer and designer within Flex, and enable the graphics classes to become first class citizens within the Flex framework.

There are many goals we want to achieve by developing Degrafa. One is eliminating the learning requirements for ActionScript in order to use the framework. There is a learning curve for a designer, or a programmer who is new to graphic development in ActionScript, which can cause a slow down in production levels.

By abstracting the graphics classes and bringing them closer to a dialect that most programmers or designers understand (MXML), regardless of background. This allows for a much easier transition.

In addition, we hope to combine high reuse and productivity (functions/algorithms/overrides) possibilities to allow both a designer and developer to interactively experiment and experience new avenues that couldn’t otherwise be easily explored, understood or discovered.

Play This Thing! Interesting game reviews site

I heard about this site from indygamer. It appears to be a new daily game review site featuring information about interesting or unusual games - often indie games but not exclusively.

Page redesign coming

It's been entirely too long since this site has been redesigned, plus it's still using a bland premade blog style (which has been functioning nicely ). Since I build sites every day you would think that I could take some time and beef up my own :)

Look for broken images, weird backgrounds, and other wierdness while the redesign takes place...

Additional Whirled Screens

I thought that I'd managed to find just about everything about Whirled that was out there, but of course I seemed to have overlooked a few things. Here are a bunch of screens from 1up.com (I used to work there...)

I don't know whether to be disappointed or excited. Disappointed in that things seem so discombobulated, or excited in that you can create everything yourself. The only issue will be creating cohesive worlds that dont look like an explosion in a clipart factory.

Is it really that hard to create a digital space where you can go and have unique experiences without them being either entirely on rails (RPG plot) or entirely unplanned (muds).

Something in between, like areas that are alive with "potential" little adventures that can either chain together or be experienced in a disconnected fashion.

A little comment goes a long way...

Gee, I've been languishing on getting the Limitless Quest codebase back on track. I never get more than a few minutes a night to work on things, and I was getting a bit discouraged. But I had a cool comment from someone on the net about how they wanted to see it up and working, and that has motivated me to continue pressing on.

It must be so fun for all you unmarried un-kidded folks to sit down at a computer and bang out code for hours. I treasure every minute I can grab and try to make every minute count when it comes to working on my own projects.

I'm going to commit to having a fully functional working version of Limitless Quest out by the end of this month. One that you can play a real game using, and one that is "feature complete." Can I do it? Yes I can. I just wont sleep all that much :)

However, tonight belongs to Metroid 3 :)

Graphics for your Indie RPG

The RPG Toolkit is a Role Playing Game building application that makes creating that game you've always wanted to create a more realistic possibility. This section of the site has some real gems. There are tilesets, battle backgrounds, and other graphics that are perfect for any rpg, regardless of whether you use RPG Toolkit or not.

Vitamin: Website For Webdevs...

If you are a web designer, developer or somehow involved in the web, you'll find this site a nice resource for news and techical info.

Creating Wii - aware applications for Opera

This article talks about how to access the javascript objects created on the Opera browser on the Wii to create applications that can access the status of ALL the wii remotes being used at one time. You could create a multiplayer wii DHTML game using this method.