I made it!

I’m a bit late in reporting this, but the last few weeks have been very busy. I’ve graduated as a Master of Arts in Game Design and Development! It has been a difficult struggle, but in the end everything fell into place and the exam committee was very excited about my results.

The graduation exhibition, which was held this week, was very interesting as well. It gave me the opportunity to meet some people who have taken an interest in Second Life and would like to have my expertise at their side when developing their projects. It’s too early to give you any more details on this though.

I do have another interesting observation I wish to share. During the exhibition I invited people to play the Babel (tower building) game. Some of the children that were present went at it with great enthousiasm, having full control of the interface with only the slightest bit of support form my side. The adults on the other hand had a lot of trouble just moving their avatar in the desired direction. Even my fellow students, who live with computer technology constantly, had some trouble controlling the game. This makes me wonder what this younger generation will be capable of as they grow up and learn to operate even more complex interfaces. It can almost make you feel old.

For those of you that are interested in the finer details of my explorations I’ve finally put my finished thesis online. You can find it under ‘Documentation’ to the right. It offers a detailed explanation of my game concepts, research and observations regarding Second Life.

Fighting time

Work on the physball 0.5 game goes at a steady pace, but I’m not sure how much of it I can get to a presentatble state before the exam. That is just a week away after all.

Elbereth has yet again been a great help in developing teh required script for teh game, but as I’m building more tiles for teh obstacle course I’m second-guessing my design motivations. The structures I have now might be interesting challenges, but are quite bland geometric shapes. It doesn’t look all that exciting.

Then sudenly I realized what had been the allure in the original physBall game. The fun part was working with the actual world as the playing field. Now that’s gone there’s nothing left but a run-of-the-mill puzzle game, and a frustrating one at that.

That’s why I’ve been thinking of incorporating the Second Life landscape into the game again. The obstacle course is tile-based, the SL grid is too. It could be quite funny to recreate teh tiles in the image of famous SL locations, like Luskwood, Caledon, Sheep Tower, Club BadGirls and other places. It would increase the visual aesthetics and the connectedness with the world, but it might deteriorate teh clearness of the obstacles.

As a stepping stone to full-scale physBall it might be the best solution to draw the connection though.

Wait… I’m just thinking of something. What if the game board and the world are actually the same. If the ball moves into an area on the board, a corresponding ball would move in the actual world. Now that could casue some mayhem. Especially as the unsuspecting players don’t know what they’re doing.

Babel video

I’ve created a short promo video of the Babel game to draw more attention to it and to demonstrate what the game is like. All footage has been taken from actual game events.

The final stretch

Only 3 weeks left until my exam. Now that Babel is up and running I have to start focusing on my presentation. What do I want to show? And how finished should the result be? Elbereth is still helping me with the scripting parts, but because I’m asking a lot he can’t give me a fixed estimate on how long it will take to complete some pieces of code. He wants to have a go at physBall first, to fix the long-distance communication. If that works he can use it for the Beacon game as well. After that things should go rather quickly. I’m not sure if it will be done before my exam though.

Fun with prims!

After I did some work on the website’s presentation today I logged into Second Life to see how I could go about kicking off Babel as a game event. I learned that I can only host official events on land that I own or that’s owned by a group that I’m a member of. But because the Babel game requires so many prims it’s best played in a spacious sandbox. So I guess I have to talk to some friends, gather people on the spot and rely on word-of-mouth to spread the buzz about this game.

Unfortunetely there weren’t any friends online, and the sandbox-dwelling crowd was rather unresponsive. So I started to play around with prims myself, to test what kind of structures could build the most stable tower. After 2 unsuccesful attempts I came up with a 2-layer structure of an ordinary cube, bracketed at the top with 4 corners. The brackets would keep the next block in place, in a way gripping onto it. This worked great until someone decided to place a bomb on the side of my tower. The blast pushed the tower over, making the topmost blocks disappear off-world, and then… it got stuck. The brackets held the tower up, even though it was now leaning over in a very disconcerting way.

The guy with the bombs kept trying to topple the rest of the tower and I had to get away to get some dinner. Afterwards I came back to see if he had managed to break down the tower, but it was still standing. I think I’ll leave it for the moment to draw some attention from teh sandbox crowd. And then it’s on teh the next sandbox to make abother attempt.

Second Strife website

During the past couple of days I filled out the webspace I reserved a while back. This website will explain and display the different game concepts I like to develop in Second Life. It will become the central hub for my endeavours in Second Life and an easy way to communicate with the audience and possible development partners.

Attached to the site is a forum where the games as well as Second Life in general can be discussed. Please, have a look and tell me what you think of it. And if you have a Second Life account don’t forget to sign up for the forum.

www.secondstrife.com

‘Babel’ game testrun

I created a very simple buidling game that required a minimum of scripting. For the scripting that was required I could rely on the help of Elbereth Witte. (Thanks for your support.)
The goal of the game is simple; build a tower as high as possible within 5 minutes. There are 2 teams (maybe 4 in a later version). The team that can build and uphold the highest tower wins the game.

Here’s the video of today’s testrun.

Thesis update

Last week I worked on my thesis, which I had ignored for some time for lack of a clear topic to write about. As time is running short I decided to just start typing and see what I could come up with. I decided to write from a personal viewpoint about my experiences with Second Life and leave the theory until later. It took me a few days, and several alternative outlines and angles on the subject, but in the end i did manage to write a roughly consistent story that’s going somewhere.

I’ve uploaded the latest version for your viewing pleasure. And don’t worry, it has some pictures too.

Super-size me

The lighthouses I mentioned earlier will definitely be replaced by player-worn ‘mecha’ AV’s. This week I studied some ways in which attachments can be connected to avatars and how big these attachments could be. The reason I want to scale them up is because the game itself will extend over a wide space. Players have to be able to see each other clearly. Besides, it would make for a wonderful spectacle for the unsuspecting residents on the ground.

‘Beacon’ game underway

In the last couple of days i created a set of basic objects for the ‘Beacon’ game. I kept with the victorian ‘arcane technology’ theme to make these objects stand out from the rest of SL, which is generally modern/photorealistic.

I wrapped the objects in a box and sent them to Elbereth so he can have a go at scripting the game mechanics into the objects. In the meantime i will look further into a way of making the game more presentable to an audience outside SL. I’ve been thinking about a web-based forum and a player-updatable map, but I’m not sure if these will be useful tools to the game. I have to look for some succesful cross-media games as a point of reference.

Below the line is a more detailed description of all the game props.