AGDC: Top Ten Social RPG Trends

 Posted by (Visited 11573 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: , , ,
Sep 172009
 

Steve Meretzsky, Dave Rohrl, both from Playdom. This is a quickly on the fly typed liveblog and I notice my space bar on my laptop is starting to erratically fail!  I stopped when the Q&A portion hit.

One year ago, stuff barely games. Then Mob Wars launched, lots of imitators. This is now called the social RPG. 13 of top 25 on MySpace, less dominant but huge on FB.Shares some dna with MMO, longform game, months to play, level up, build character, but spare presentation, spreadsheet style UI,low production values. Play sessions are usuallya few minutes due to a mechanic of energy depletion that limits your play sessions.

This talk will cover ten trends, and then make some guesses about the next year.

#1.New horizons in virtual goods.

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ExitReality: another VRML world

 Posted by (Visited 7508 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: , ,
May 282008
 

ExitReality Launches With Carl’s Jr Deal, and it looks like another attempt to commercialize VRML, much like several of the other projects we have seen over the last couple of years.

The comment thread is interesting precisely because of its mix of reactions:

This is really nice! Really love to check it out. It can turn any web page into 3D space? How can this be done? Amazing stuff!

to

I’d like one double failburger to go.

One commenter makes the point that has to be made about any plug-in based approach to the problem: what about adoption of the plug-in? Most people simply say no to all plug-in install requests. This is a significant challenge across the web — it takes really compelling content to drive adoption.

In any case, ExitReality seems to have some nice features that seem to rapidly be becoming de rigueur: HTML on a polygon, video on a polygon, etc. Not sure how they did the Burger Time emulation — Flash on a poly? Most interesting is the “install and automatically make a 3d space from your webpage” thing that is hinted at. It’s not that hard to do, really — pass in the URL to the world, and have the world scrape the page for assets to use — but it potentially makes a page a bit more compelling.

Edit: Apparently there’s a MySpace app as well, which connects to the branded worlds.

Metachat is on Facebook now too

 Posted by (Visited 9756 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.