Metaplace - Community Spotlight - Life of the Party by DrOffset

Metaplace! That's what!

Build a virtual apartment and put it on your website. Work with friends to make a huge MMORPG. Share your puzzle game with friends. We have a vision: to let you build anything, and play everything, from anywhere. Eventually, anyway. We have to finish first.

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Feel like writing about Metaplace.com on your own site? Maybe you're a journalist? Here you'll find all sorts of materials that might make that easier: fact sheets, screenshots, logos and other artwork, and all the other handy stuff that goes in a Media Kit. Go nuts -- you've got blanket permission to use any of this stuff!

www.areae.net

Areae, Inc.

11770 Bernardo Plaza Court
Suite 101

San Diego, CA 92128

USA

Phone: 858-451-2700 Fax: 858-451-2722

For press enquiries, please email: metaplace@consortpartners.com

What is Metaplace?

Our motto is: build anything, play everything, from anywhere. Until now, virtual worlds have all worked like the closed online services from before the internet took off. They had custom clients talking to custom servers, and users couldn't do much of anything to change their experience. We're out to change all of that.

Metaplace is a next-generation virtual worlds platform designed to work the way the Web does. Instead of giant custom clients and huge downloads, Metaplace lets you play the same game on any platform that reads our open client standard. We supply a suite of tools so you can make worlds, and we host servers for you so that anyone can connect and play. And the client could be anywhere on the Web.

We hope there will be millions of worlds made with Metaplace. It could get hard to find stuff if we're right, so the portal lets you easily search, rate, review, and tag worlds and games of all sorts. You also get a user profile so you can find each other.

Can I make my own world?

That's sort of the whole point. You should be able to stage up a massively multiplayer world with basic chat and a map you can build on in less than five minutes. It's that easy. Inherit a stylesheet -- puzzle game, or shooter, or chat world -- and off you go! Building maps and places is as easy as pasting in links from the Web, and dragging and dropping the pictures into your world.

What's more, you can link your world to someone else's world. Put a doorway in your virtual apartment that leads to Pirate Vs Ninja-land! Stick your world in a widget on your Facebook or MySpace profile. Mail it to a friend and they can log in with one click.

What sorts of worlds can I make?

You can make pretty much any sort of game or world you want. You can decide whether it's massively multiplayer or not (it's MMO out of the box, but you can set it to a lower size if you want). You can decide whether to have physics or not, you can change the keymappings and the interface, the sort of stuff there is in the world, the maps... basically, it's all up to you. Game logic is written in MetaScript, which is based on Lua. So it's easy to make whatever kind of game or world that you want.

Metaplace will support everything from 2d overhead grids through first-person 3d. However, right now we only have clients that do 2d of various sorts, including grid view, 2d isometric, 2.5d heightfields, and so on. We expect to keep working on the 3d client support.

How does it interact with the web?

We speak Web fluently. Every world is a web server, and every object has a URL. You can script an object so that it feeds RSS, XML, or HTML to a browser. This lets you do things like high score tables, objects that email you, player profile pages right on the player -- whatever you want. Every object can also browse the Web: a chat bot can chatter headlines from an RSS feed, a newspaper with real headlines can sit on your virtual desk, game data could come from real world data... you get the idea. No more walled garden.

Who makes it?

Metaplace is made by Areae, Inc. We're a team of veterans of the game and Web industries who thought that the current way of doing things was kinda slow and didn't give users like you enough control. Check out the company website to learn more about us!

Also, feel free to sign up for . Our newsletter will keep you in the loop. ;)

Community Spotlight - Life of the Party by DrOffset

This week's community spotlight is featuring Life of the Party, by DrOffset.

Can you tell us a bit about “Life of the Party”?

Life of the Party is a fast-paced game where your objective is to keep your guests entertained. Think of it like those 'spinning plates' acts we used to see on TV (search Charlie Callas.) The performer has to go from plate to plate and get it spinning again before it falls. The NPC guests have a 'fun meter' which is basically the health bar that goes down to zero over time, making them leave your party and costing you points. You replenish their fun meter by standing close enough to them, giving them attention and gaining points. The guests are wandering around randomly so it gets pretty hectic to keep them all entertained.

How long has it taken you to build this world so far?

I've spent about eight hours total getting the game to its present state. That's spread out over a week of free time.

What has been your favorite part about building this world?

Finding out that my random doodles and designs can actually serve some purpose. :) Also it's been really gratifying to hear that people actually enjoy playing it.

Where did you obtain the art for “Life of the Party”?

I created all the art myself. At the moment it's all hand-drawn 2D, but I'm slowly building the characters in a 3D toon-shaded way for easier animation. There's some fantastic free art available on the web for prototyping, but I'm an artist so I felt compelled to make my own. I've been creating a library of various icons, characters, and simple graphics that is free to use for other alpha testers.

Did you work alone or collaborate with others?

I've leveraged a lot of script modules created by other people, and a lot of people have helped with implementation. For example: the health bar is the one from the Metaplace Blog posts and John gave me the click-to-move code. The NPC random movement script is either Thor's or Raph's, from the Wiki. The only part I really scripted from scratch is the measurement from each NPC to the player, and Arcturus helped me get the syntax right. So yeah, there's no way I could have done it all myself, luckily people in MP are very helpful and share code freely.

If not finished, what else do you have planned for “Life of the Party”?

There's a lot to do! Right now Life of the Party is a fun toy, a proof of concept. The challenge now is to keep the fun but make it feel like a real game, with menus, levels, and pickups. The scripting concepts are totally do-able, the hard part is keeping focus on one project. :) Will add lots of animation and sound to bring the game to life as well.

Do you have any other worlds or games in mind to build on Metaplace, or are you working on anything else right now?

I have more ideas than time to create them. :) As far as publicly known projects, it would be great to see the Metaplace Tactics project through, it's a turn-based strategy RPG in the style of the old pulp sci-fi comics. I'm also involved in the metaPunk RPG, which is progressing steadily. There's more, but that will come later.

Can you tell us a bit about yourself?

I'm an independent contractor that does 3D work for visual effects companies. I'm working on my skills as a creature artist. I also maintain a blog at http://droffset.blogspot.com . And I'll be a Dad soon!

Great work DrO! Come back next week for another community spotlight!

Tami "Cuppycake" Baribeau
Community Manager