Planet Nectarius

The cool thing that excites me about metaplace, is we’ll be seeing worlds for communities to just hang out in. Instead of just a forum or whatever attached to a webcomics, news sites, or blogs, we’ll be able to hang out in little worlds attached to existing communities. I think people will be surprised at just how awesome the games and worlds that people will fork, iterate, fork, merge, borrow, will become.

There’ll be people dedicated to making mmo templates that are specifically designed for being borrowed by website communities.

As an example, it’s pretty inevitable that Penny Arcade will be forced to make one filled with Gabe’s art. I think they even mentioned that in a post once.

Currently MMO’s usually need to create communities from scratch. Web 2 has given us extremely deep and numerous social networks in many different forms. It’s a huge market really. I think metaplace will succeed because it is trying to fit in snugly along side the current web concepts. It will complement existing frameworks and communities, not try to take advantage of them. I think it’s more of a tool than a gaming space.

Think of building a site.. Hmm now we need a blog, we need forum, we need a flickr page, we need a metaplace. If it works it wont be the only option, others will eventually compete, but it will definitely be the first.

I’ve been working on my own game engine. Not because I think the world needs another one, but because it’s easier to understand and I learn more from a primitive one I’ve built myself then learn someone else’s. It makes me appreciate just what goes into a real one. I haven’t even got mine to bounce a ball around yet.

I already have one that does that I made a breakout clone with, but this one will be better. If I ever get it to that stage that is. I want it to use an embedded Lua interpreter for all the game logic. I also want it to use guichan for the gui. It’d be nice to be able to load the Gui from Lua scripts. That sounds pretty ambitious, so maybe I wont get that far. I definitely want to have the game logic for each level run from Lua scripts though. Some objects could have scripts attached to them that run when something happens. eg. triggers, or OnDeath scripts for various characters or whatever.

I’m thinking of the way nwscript does it or metaplace will do it. Metaplace got me motivated to experiment, since it’d be nice to learn Lua, so I can be ready to toy around in it when it hits open beta.

So far I’ve got a bare skeleton of an engine, it loads SDL and paints any game “objects” from a list. Objects so far are sprites and text.