Alpha Update
Hello everyone!
It has been awhile since we have given you an update on our progress here at Metaplace, and we have plenty to talk about.
We have started our Alpha program and have had a good number of new worlds created in the last month or so! We’re quite pleased with the responses that we’ve received and can’t wait to let more people in to test and start creating. The feedback on our web build tool, the server, and the play client has been very helpful and positive. It’s refreshing to get a new outside perspective to make the changes that our users want, and to hear comments that assure us we are heading in the right direction.
We’ve been working hard on creating a library of tutorials that help acclimate both beginners and programmers to our platform. By the second tutorial, users are already building their very first game (you may remember Kaboom! for Atari). We have separate tutorial tracks for scripting, world building, modules, and game design – and they are an excellent introduction to give testers a jump start. Another thing we’ve been doing is building a collection of code snippets on our wiki. Our testers and developers alike have been contributing to building what will eventually be an extensive assortment of Metascript snippets to help them do all kinds of things such as look up a word definition on the web or add name tags on all the players in your world.
If you’re wondering if anything fun is coming out of Metaplace yet, you’re in luck! We’ve had several completed games so far, including two of Raph’s puzzle games – Wheelwright and Ant Farm. They are both games about rotating blocks into place on a field.
In Wheelwright, you have a wheel moving around a field of colored blocks. You can spin the wheel to the left or right, and any blocks that are sitting on the rim of the wheel will spin too (the block on the axis won’t). If you manage to form a block of 3x3 of the same color, you capture those blocks. Of course, you’re working against the clock! Different sorts of blocks are worth different amounts of points, and eventually you start running into immovable blocks.
Ant Farm is similar; here blocks are raining down, and you are trying to bring together the blocks that form gems. The trick here is that as you churn the dirt, the gemstone bits get tumbled around. The deeper the gem, the more points it is worth. You have to mine a certain number of diamonds before the playfield fills up with dirt.
We’ll be including more information on these games in the near future, and you never know – we might have playable versions of these and other games up in the new year for you all to enjoy. Other than puzzle games, we have several other projects underway – including a panda-themed social chat room with minigames, a space shooter game, and a miniature RPG. It has been so exciting to see how creative our testers have been while exploring Metaplace and proving the diversity of the platform. Anything is possible, from MMOs to word & puzzle games to MMOs with word & puzzle games embedded within them. We have intentions to start testing our play client publically and we are also planning to do some developer chats and events to start involving more people. In addition we’ll be broadening our alpha to include more of you, and begin making the move to Beta – where the number of invited people will move into the thousands. Have any questions, thoughts, or suggestions? Head on over to our forums and post away!
Tami "Cuppycake" Baribeau
Community Manager
