Game Development

A Strangeling in Second Life

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Strawberry Singh  has a post about a new game, Strangelings, expected to be out the first quarter of 2013. She says the Ozimals team has joined up with two former Lindens and a financial expert to form Flying Monkey Interactive, Inc. The team is developing a product platform called Toto that will run on iPad, the web, iPhone, and Facebook.

Strawberry Singh as a Strangeling

The Magic of Oz region has been remade to create a promotional and information spot in Second Life. It is an all mesh area. Check it out. Also bounce over to Strawberry’s blog and see the video she made. It shows the Strangling in all is awesome cutness: Strangelings & Mesh Oz! 

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Linden Lab’s Dio & Versu

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EzY McAlpine tipped me about an article on TechCrunch.com: How Linden Lab Hopes To Find Second Life In Mobile Creative Play. It is short but points out some new aspects of Dio & Versu, games coming from Linden Lab™.

In the article Darrell Etherington quotes Rod Humble, Linden Lab CEO, talking about Dio: “It’s sort of like Second Life without the graphics, or Facebook but trying to be more of a creative space. … So it’s a web experience and you create your space, but within the spaces, everyone has their own avatar and avatars carry inventory. The way you navigate from space to space is via doors, and you can make things like a MUSH [multi-user shared hack] or hobby space very easily.”

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Planet-sized video game

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Every so often I find something about a new level of virtual world. The art and science of creating 3D real time virtual worlds keeps moving forward. Today I saw another demo of a coming platform for gaming.

Planet-sized video game gets its first release – 2 minute video in a short article.

Outerra's Anteword - Fly Forever

There is also an Outerra Tech Demo released! One can download and try it out for free. A torrent download is available in addition to standard downloads. File size is 219mb, a couple of minutes via Torrent.

If you are thinking of downloading it, check the video driver notes first. Be sure you can run it.

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New Things Coming to #SL

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For some time I’ve read the blogs and posts of SL users saying the Lindens developing Second Life needed to spend more time in SL. The idea being that if they used the product rather than just developing what they think we need, SL would be a better place. I think it is a good idea.

It seems Rod and Will think that is a good idea too. Hamlet posted, “Linden Launches Monster-Dodging Game for Premium Users UPDATE: Rod Humble Explains — It Was Made With New Tools Coming Soon for SL Game Developers” which is about a new game in Second Life. He has been chasing down his contacts in the Lab to find out what is up with that.

A quote he got from Rod says they built the game not to be building games, but to learn what tools are needed to be able to build games in Second Life. That pretty much is the idea many of us have put forward for Lindens. Walk in our shoes and you’ll understand. The Lab has now done that. They built a game to find out what we are up against.

Whether walking in our shoes is a better idea than listening to us is yet to be seen. I am more and more certain that the idea of transparency for the Lab’s development is a thing of the past. Much like Obama’s idea of government transparency has faded.

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About Second Life…

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One of my favorite Second Life bloggers is Gwyneth Llewelyn. Her posts are infrequent, but they do cover a subject in depth. She has a new article up: Innovation, yes, but wrong turn. One can learn a lot about Second life from the article.

Gwyneth’s viewpoints are usually a fresh look at Second Life and the directions taken by Linden Lab. In this article she lays out a new perspective, basically calling a spade a spade. In her viewpoint Second Life is a niche product/service and she makes a good argument for her point of view. She also makes good points for what can be done with a niche market.

The four page article is worth the read.

Game Design Information

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While I suspect most of the readers of this blog have interests more Second Life and OpenSim oriented, there are a number of us interested in what makes any computer game popular. In some ways that translates to what may make SL popular. Also, some SL/OS residents are interested in what can make their inside-SL-games popular. Here are some sources of information for those with such interests.

Game Design
Game Design - Image by: amsfrank @ Flickr

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