WebFlock

 Posted by (Visited 9969 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: , , , , ,
Jul 172008
 

WebFlock screenshot

The Electric Sheep Company has launched WebFlock, which is an “under 100k/year” Flash-based solution for building white-label virtual worlds. ESC will do the hosting and presumably the work of making the world; their first customer is the TV show The L-Word.

Many of the articles and commentary are comparing it to Lively, but the comparison seems wrong to me — Lively is aimed at end users making small spaces, whereas this seems more like it’s up against SmartFoxServer and ElectroServer as a white-label solution. It will fill a nice niche there, given the radically different style of the visuals — the other two seems to lean towards kids’ worlds.

I would expect to see more adult IP (TV shows, movies, businesses) using this sort of platform for their virtual world presence, rather than embedding their presence inside of a single world.

Some misc links

 Posted by (Visited 6008 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: , , , , ,
Jul 072008
 
  • Oh look, another 3d engine in Flash.
  • EA and Hasbro have gotten around to launching a legit Scrabble on Facebook. But Scrabulous appears undaunted.
  • Once in a long ago, I half-heartedly suggested to Gordon Walton that the way to fix the SWG Correspondents program was to have them be player-elected. We never pursued it; the concern was always that they would feel that they would have the right to dictate policy and development priorities, thus taking away control from the dev team. Today, we see that EVE’s council gets covered in the New York Times. As a curiosity, for now — can the day when equivalent deliberations generate mainstream news be far behind?

Lila Dreams: a very cool concept

 Posted by (Visited 7358 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: , ,
May 302008
 

Lila Dreams – Home

What the heck is Lila Dreams? It’s a massively multiplayer online game where you become a mental entity (called a “memekin”) and live out an adventurous life inside an 11 year-old girl’s psyche.

They also have a blog with interviews and the like; looks like it’s in Flash and will be on Kongregate. Based on the concept art, I’m betting it is a side view game…

Flash makes its move

 Posted by (Visited 8776 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: ,
May 152008
 

This happened days ago, and I don’t know how I missed it. It’s the Open Screen Project, which boils down to Adobe making a big move with Flash.

What did they do, and what does it mean?

  1. The file formats will be open. Anyone can write their own player on any device, for free.
  2. Their player is free too, to integrate wherever.
  3. The protocols are open too.

Here’s a few ways to think about this:

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