Three Rings Unveiling Game-Making Platform?
Pirate Daniel James’s Three Rings, responsible for the hugely popular multiplayer Puzzle Pirates gamespace, is developing a game-making platform to support Flash and Java games within a larger virtual world, according to a session description from O’Reilly’s Emerging Technology Conference at the end of March. That’s news to me, though I’m not entirely sure it hasn’t been mentioned elsewhere. It sounds like the session features Three Rings co-founder Michael Bayne rolling out the toolkit for attendees to use in making a game during the session: “Three Rings is developing a platform for building multiplayer online games in Flash and Java that operate as part of a larger virtual world where people do things like talk about their cats, decorate their virtual living room, and most importantly, play games. With an aim toward fostering user creativity, we’re opening up all of the tools for creating the world and the games in it. In this workshop we’ll have people collaborating in small groups to think up a game and build it. . . . We’ll provide the toolkit and useful advice.”
With Multiverse and Areae either out there or coming soon, as well as open-source clients and servers for Second Life already knocking around, and not Three Rings’s entry, the virtual world-making space looks to be getting a lot more interesting this year.
Feeds
It’s a great time to be working in this space, that’s for sure.
last June Daniel James wrote about SL and how he thought some things could be done different. And ended with this: “And, in closing, I am going to put my money where my mouth is (instead of just my foot, as usual), as Three Rings will develop something oriented towards player-created content. Ya’ll will have to wait and see that, but hereby I grant open season to ridicule me appropriately when I come down from the mountain with my tablets… I think those hooded robes would look pretty good on me.”
http://thefloggingwillcontinue.com/?p=9
You reported on it btw. ;)
I think there are some indirect mentions of it in later blog posts of him as well.
Also on the 3 rings website is a picture of something called Meta Soy. That will launch this year. I think that is probably what it is called.
Mark, my SXSW Screenburn panel on Avatar-Based Marketing will include panelist Lauren Wheeler, a project manager at Three Rings involved in an upcoming top-secret project. Since you’ll be at SXSW, maybe you can wring some further details out of her :) I know I intend to try!
Frans: Yes, I remember that (which is why I titled the post “unveiled”), but this was the first details I’d seen of it.
Tony: Looking forward to seeing you at SXSW! I have to call you on flogging your panel on my blog, though. It’s not that I mind, I don’t at all, it’s just that you so loathe advertising that I had to smile when I read that. :) It’s all good, though, since I’m about to flog my panel in a blog post, heh.
Wow, “flogging?” Not only is the panelist in question directly relevant to the discussion, but I deliberately didn’t link to my blog post about the panel so as not to drive traffic away from your site. Frankly, I think what I posted is less intrusive and more relevant than a trackback, but whatever. See you next month, floggypants.
Yaar, I was just having fun with you, man, didn’t mean anything by it. It was totally relevant. And of course, I couldn’t resist the opportunity to use the word “flogging” in a thread about pirates, heh.
Umm, busted! It’s is all true. We are hoping to show off the project at GDC this March (Michael Bayne and I are doing a talk on it) but it will be in closed alpha at that point, the Gods willing! Public beta will come later in the year.
p.s. the name is going to change.
[…] Three Rings’ Gets into the User-Created Online World Game? By Wagner James Au | Raph Koster and Linden Lab, man the mizzens! Scuttlebutt is Three Rings, the casual online game studio behind the cult hit Puzzle Pirates is about to storm into the user-created MMO space. Word first surfaced on 3pointD, which caught wind of Three Rings co-founder mentioning their upcoming “platform for building multiplayer online games in Flash and Java that operate as part of a larger virtual world”. […]