Gamemaking

Wherein I talk about games I am making

How Metaplace was born

 Posted by (Visited 5203 times)  Gamemaking  Tagged with:
Sep 052008
 

I got asked where the idea for Metaplace came from on our public forums. I wrote this lengthy reply, which turned into a blog post over there, and now a blog post over here.

I came from the world of muds. That means I got my start in virtual worlds in the days when anyone could download a codebase, and assuming they had a server they could get going and dive into running a world of their own.

That went away with the big MMORPGs. But when we did UO: The Second Age, there had already been a movement among players towards having “grey shard” server emulators. Some of the tools users had made to hack the UO datafiles were actually better than the tools we had in-house.

So I informally floated an idea for the expansion that didn’t go anywhere. Why not release the game server as a binary, release documentation for our scripting language (which was fantastic for the time), release our tools client, and let people make their own worlds?

You will have to go over there for the rest. 🙂

Metaplace status update!

 Posted by (Visited 4462 times)  Gamemaking  Tagged with:
Jul 162008
 

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…


Metaplace – Transition Tile Maker

 Posted by (Visited 7293 times)  Gamemaking  Tagged with: ,
Jul 082008
 

Another day, another little tool release over at the Metaplace site. This one is a little helper that assists in making transition textures between different terrain tiles. Sure, some engines do blending for you, but some don’t. And some effects really require handmade transitions. Well, the Transition Tile Maker lets you make your own blend masks and share them, or use the premade ones for making transitions. We figure there’s art tasks for UGC that are kind of tedious, so why not help the process along?

You can grab it for Windows or for Intel Mac…

IsoTileMaker

 Posted by (Visited 4933 times)  Gamemaking  Tagged with: ,
Apr 072008
 

isoicon.PNGI just realized I never posted about this over here, only on the main Metaplace site. A while back I did a little tool for Metaplace users to help them make isometric walls. Nothing too fancy, and there’s higher-end tools out there for this sort of purpose, but this does do some nice stuff like help you make sloping walls, do whole batches of textures and generate hundreds of walls quickly, etc.

So here it is — free, and no guarantees. 😉

If you want to check out some of the stuff that users have made with it, there’s a  little gallery thread over on the MP website. And the latest version is generally linked here.

Metachat is on Facebook now too

 Posted by (Visited 9829 times)  Gamemaking  Tagged with: , , ,
Mar 272008
 

You can get it here.

This actually connects to the same chat world as the one on MySpace, and the one on our forums. So it’s all one big happy cross-SNS virtual worldlet in Flash.

We also got a bunch of forums interested in trying to integrate a Metaplace world on their forums… it’ll be one based on Metachat to start with, though it can of course change later. It’ll be their own world, though.

Last time I mentioned this little app on here, people challenged the question of whether it was actually a world or not. Well, it supports hundreds to thousands, there’s physics, a sense of place and space, you can kick a soccer ball, interact in real time… the background could scroll, and you could have avatars instead of profile pics. So… close enough, to my mind. 🙂

BTW, we’re going to start spotlighting community members and their worlds. The first spotlight is up now — Tachevert (of WorldIV) and his world “Danser,” which is one of my favorite MP projects so far.

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