Metaplace - Community Spotlight - Dragonlings by chooseareality

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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www.areae.net

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

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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!

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Community Spotlight - Dragonlings by chooseareality

This week's Community Spotlight is on chooseareality's game, Dragonlings. Dragonlings is a unique game in development with some very interesting and exciting plans for the future. Please enjoy an interview with the game's creator, chooseareality.

Can you tell us a bit about “Dragonlings”?

In Dragonlings you live as a dragon. Your life starts as a hatchling and you can grow over time into one of the giant dragons we know from fantasy worlds. The actions you take will determine the skills and abilities you have. Initially you will be able to explore the hatchery caverns and the forest outside. The world will grow as time passes into a full continent and eventually other continents as well.

Dragonlings will be a MMORPG and entirely Player vs. Environment, but it will most certainly be on a much, much smaller scale than the commercial products out there.

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

I work at lunch or at home for a hour or two a day. I would say I have put in 30+ hours so far, but a lot of that time has been experimental as I try new things and learn from my mistakes. I think the same game started today would only take me about 10 hours to get to the point it is at now.

What has been your favorite part about building this world?

It feels really good to be able to accomplish something and feel like I'm actually making progress on a game that I want to play. After years of false starts, and several books on game programming, I finally have a way as an independent developer to make a game while not being overwhelmed by the amount of things I need to learn.

Where did you obtain the art for “Dragonlings”?

I have no one to blame but myself for all the art in Dragonlings, but that art is very much temporary and someday I will replace it will something else. Thankfully I've been able to use some art for multiple things using the Tinting and Scaling that is built into the Metaplace system which has been a great trick to extend my meager resources.

Did you work alone or collaborate with others?

I work completely alone, well if you don't count the constant input I get from the helpful community I mentioned above.

If not finished, what else do you have planned for “Dragonlings”?

I am not even close to finished and really I don't know if it will ever be finished. Here is my list of things I want to accomplish before the initial game is done:

Quest system to train and guide new dragons through the world.

Skill system that allow you to get better at skills you want to focus on.

Learning system so you can learn new skills from other creatures.

Growing system so you get bigger over time.

Reworked graphics with animation.

Sound Effects.

Environmental Music.

Character customisation system.

See what I mean about never finishing? :)

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

Just for fun I made a real quick game with dropping balls that bounce off bumpers toward the bottom of the screen. Kinda, like the Plinko game they play in Japan. The goal of the game is to catch them. It took maybe a total of 3 hours to make a quick demo and it is pretty fun so I think I may take time away from Dragonlings to flesh it out into a whole game. I have to thank Raph for the physics code though, I have been out of school for a bit long to quickly come up with circular collision code. =)

Can you tell us a bit about yourself?

I have played games since my first system, a Colecovision, and have always wanted to make them. I have notebooks full of different ideas from the years past so I am sure I will never run out of new games to try to make with Metaplace.

When I'm not trying to make games I am a Systems Analyst/Programmer for a government agency in the Central Valley of California. I work with VB.NET, ASP.NET, Javascript, SQL Server and other Microsoft technologies on internal applications and I work with Dreamweaver, Flash, CSS, HTML, etc. on our internal and external web pages.

When I am not working on computers I like to read (Horror, Fantasy, Drama, Philosophy), play video games (Wii, PC, PS2, DS), create art, hang out with my wonderful partner and our kids, and bicycle.

Thank you for the great interview! Stay tuned next week for another spotlight!