Gamemaking

Wherein I talk about games I am making

Metaplace’s public debut

 Posted by (Visited 9266 times)  Gamemaking
Jan 312008
 

Edit: in case it wasn’t clear — this was a “sneak preview” sort of thing; we are not live to the public, it was just for a few hours. 🙂

Well, we didn’t make a big deal about it, but Metaplace has now officially been played by actual players, and not alpha testers. Today we did a dev chat using Metaplace itself as the platform for the IRC-like text chat, and in the middle of it we also showed off a little bit of a more graphical space with avatars. It was a chance to both talk to folks and also to shove a high number of people at the server and client, including guest logins, to try to stress things a bit.

It all went spectacularly well, too. We expected things to blow up, but nothing did. Extremely low CPU usage, even with over 80 simple avatars walking around and chatting in one relatively small space (small enough that there was no real network culling going on). That’s a decent achievement for any virtual world system. 🙂 Bandwidth was a bit high, but we know things to work on there that are easy big gains. Seems like fairly few weird browser issues — which is easily the biggest bugaboo with doing something so Web-based. I have seen that a few folks failed to get in at all, and we’ll try to track down why…

We’ll be posting the official chat log with our next blog post, probably. But in the meantime, a few of the VW-centric news sites were in:

Our friends over at the Electric Sheep were also on hand. And of course, there’s blogs by bunches of folks who attended, like TBowl, Feeding Change, Oh No, Aliens!, Cooking XP, and Dr. Offset’s. Edit: Dr. Offset’s has a little bit more, and there’s Emergent Future’s take here.

A couple of those have pics of the (brief) graphical demo. Everyone’s only one avatar… we’ll have to save character customization for another day. 😉

Another Escapist interview, Metaplace chat

 Posted by (Visited 6575 times)  Game talk, Gamemaking
Jan 292008
 

I did another Escapist Interview, all about Metaplace this time. Which suggests that I should point out that there’s a live chat happening soon:

Thursday, January 31 at 5:00pm Pacific Standard Time. You probably want to update your Flash player to the latest version.

More details are here.

…all professional game developers were once users. It’s not like some magic switch gets flicked the minute that they become a pro that makes their stuff good, and we’ve all played pro stuff that wasn’t that good. There’s just a spectrum, from good to bad, and whether or not people are pro or amateur has nothing to do with that quality line. The pros tend to get access to money and the good guys tend to gravitate toward being pros, but it doesn’t mean that an amateur cannot make good content. Maybe they’re just a hobbyist, maybe they’ve never had tools that were good enough, maybe they’ve never been given a chance.

Rock, Paper, Shotgun interview

 Posted by (Visited 14089 times)  Game talk, Gamemaking
Jan 172008
 

I did an inteview with Rock, Paper, Shotgun a short while back.

It’s funny, because tidbits from the interview have been picked up as news stories by various sources. And they all led with a different take on it! Over at GamesIndustry.biz, it was how the industry needs new inspiration. But over at  Virtual Worlds News, it’s all about “players will touch Metaplace soon!” About which more shortly.

One of the things is that our influences in the game industry are fairly narrow. Bioshock is one of the big hits of the year, and everyone is impressed by its core narrative influences. It’s a critique of Ayn Rand and Objectivism and all of that stuff. But if you think about it, Objectivism is common currency for game developers, it’s a nerd kind of thing. So we’re not referencing anything too far afield there, a little further afield, but not a lot. A lot of the common cultural currency is not all that diverse, and that was really hammered home for me by watching the Xbox Live trailers for the new year. I sat with my wife and she said that if she hadn’t been told that they were all different games, she would not have been able to tell them apart. They were all so similar.

Hiring a Metaplace content developer!

 Posted by (Visited 5552 times)  Gamemaking
Jan 152008
 

This is a fun job, and you don’t often see one posted like this. 🙂 If the below is you, drop us an email at jobs (at) areae.net!

Areae is on a mission to revolutionize virtual worlds and MMOs. We’re a venture-backed company in beautiful San Diego, and our investors share our passion and vision for the future of online gaming. Our core team includes veteran MMO developers with deep experience from online leaders like EA, Sony Online, and NC Soft, and we have developed and launched some of the world’s most successful online games to date including Ultima Online, Star Wars Galaxies and EQ2. We are currently looking for a Content Developer to join our team and help develop the next generation of online gaming.

The successful candidate will assist in the design and development of new content using the Metaplace platform, support of customer technical queries via the forums and direct chat, documentation of the toolset and scripting language on the public Wiki. She or he will also assist developers in the identification and analysis of toolset issues. The position requires 1+ years experience in Lua or object-oriented programming, familiarity with principles of game and user interface design, and the flexibility to adapt to daily changes in the development environment. Prior experience with Game Design or Quality Assurance in a production environment is a plus.

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