3pointD.com

Tech Warfare

Second Life’s 2006 Game Developers Contest has reached the finals, with eight games arrayed around two sims in SL for the public to play and judge. If you haven’t seen what can be done by talented scripters in Second Life, this is a good place to experience it. The games will be up through May 11th. We toured the games last night as part of an upcoming SecondCast show. I’ll touch on two here, though most all of them were fun and interesting.

Tech Warfare, by SL resident Eckhart Dillon (pictured above), is a team-based real-time strategy game that plays very much like a PC-based RTS. Teams of avatars can create units — consisting of small bots that are created wherever you’re standing — which then go off on their own power to do battle with each other, the goal being to destroy the enemy base. The game supports up to 16 players on two teams. The game is fairly bare-bones at the moment, but the gamers among us immediately saw ways it could easily be made more sophisticated. That said, even the small four-on-four match we participated in was great fun. And I was amused to hear one player ask, “What’s the best kind of unit to build when you’re near the enemy base?” This is just the kind of game that could spawn wonky fansites where such arcana is swapped and argued over — always a sign that you’ve done something right. Click this SL link to visit.

Castle Wars

Castle Wars, by resident RacerX Gullwing, is a simpler but more tactile version of a similar idea. You control a catapult mounted on a tall castle and are charged with destroying your neighbors’ castles before they destroy yours. That’s about all there is to it. Very good fun. Click this SL link to visit.

What was most notable about the eight games on offer was that most all of them were fun. To me, this is one of the best indications that a technology is coming into its own — not that you can do things with it that are impressive, but that you can do things with it that are useful, no matter how simple they may be. The games end up being a great way to display SL as a development platform. Game technology is regularly out in front of anything else being developed in a given environment, and things are no different in the virtual world.

One interesting thing to note: The games are being judged by how much money they earn during the final stage of the contest. This will turn out to be a wildly inaccurate measure of how well they fulfill the “fun” metric, however. Of the eight games we played last night, we spent the most time at a game called SLictionary, [<-- SL link] which is essentially Pictionary (or iSketch), played with SL’s building tools. One player builds a 3D model of a word while the others try to guess what it is. Riotous and very social — but though we spent the most time and probably had the most fun there, and though this was one of the easiest games to get into, we also spent the least amount of money there of any of the eight games we visited. Why Linden Lab has taken this EA-like approach to judging its game contest is baffling.