Wherein I talk about games I am making
Here’s the official press release:
Playdom Announces Acquisition of Metaplace — MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., July 8 /PRNewswire/ —.
Coverage also popping up in a few more places, like TechCrunch and Games.com.
This is going to be a lot of fun. 🙂
Some of you long-time blog readers may recall a little public project of mine called Andean Bird.*
But that is not what I am writing about. Instead, I wanted to call your attention to this!
That’s a prototype by Michael Wilson, who writes
Hello there. I enjoyed your playing with your ‘Andean Bird’ prototype three years back, which was a concept I’d wanted to explore myself but never had time. I was sad to see that you didn’t continue the project. However I’ve recently had some free time to learn XNA, and I’ve made a 3D bird flight simulator that is perhaps a spiritual successor. It still needs some elements to be a playable game – sound, a ‘flight path’ to follow etc – but the simulation mechanics are working well.
Today we announced that the consumer-facing Metaplace service, the one you all know as the user-generated worlds website at Metaplace.com, is closing on January 1st. There’s a FAQ and an official letter on the site.
The reason? Well, it just hasn’t gotten traction. I have many thoughts on why, but I hope you’ll forgive me if I don’t go into all of them right now. It is a sad day for us here, and I know many users are going to be very disappointed by this turn of events.
Metaplace Inc isn’t going away – in fact, we have some pretty exciting plans. But those plans are best shared on a future day.
If we have to sunset the service, we want to do it right. So for the next two weeks – come visit, and enjoy and celebrate all of the amazing creativity and work users put into their worlds. We’re providing a way for users to grab the data that makes up their worlds. We’ll be opening a website for the community so that you don’t lose touch with your Metaplace friends. And we’ll have a big party on the last day – because Metaplace.com will not go quietly, but with the sound of meeps and music and laughter.
It was a wonderful world full of wonderful people, and I will miss it more than I can say.
I don’t know if I have raved about Matt Sturges’ work in comics here before. House of Mystery (available in two collections to date: Room and Boredom and Love Stories For Dead People) has vaulted onto the list of my favorite ongoing series. He’s also involved with the Eisner-award-winning Fables universe, particularly through Jack of Fables.
But I am a bit biased — I knew Matt back in the days when I lived in Austin, when were both caught up in the variously overlapping writers’ circles around Turkey City (the writer’s workshop best known in SF/F circles for its widely-used lexicon). Matt was a member of the Clockwork Storybook collective, from which several writers of note have emerged.
I’m super happy to have Matt cornered on the Metaplace stage today at 2pm Pacific, to get grilled about comics, writing, and whatever else attendees want to hear about!
Edit: the event is over, but the chat log is available here.
This is awesome, and I will be signing up tonight and probably throwing one of my board game designs up there to try it out. 🙂 The short form: CafePress for board game designers.
Their brief FAQ covers the basics.
At TGC, you can start selling your game with only the push of a button. There are no up-front fees, no contractural obligations, no distributors, and you don’t need a big publisher to decide your game will sell 10,000 units in the first year.
TGC is your dream made simple!
Why TGC? We’ve been in the game design/manufacturing industry for over 10 years and published many of our own titles. We’ve always specialized in small run games, but we did it only for ourselves. Over the years we’ve gotten hundreds of requests from other indie designers asking if we’d publish their games, and finally we realized that our process could be applied to games other than our own as well.
Looks like they handle not just boards and cards, but also sell a nice assortment of parts that can go into the game. Not as wide an array as I have in my prototype kit, but decent nonetheless. 🙂
