Assets for Owen

One of the main focuses of Metaplace is to encourage collaboration between users, enabling just about anyone to make a game without requiring gigantic teams and long development times. One of our alpha testers, Owen, is looking for some artist helpers for his game that he’s working on, a game like Advance Wars. These assets could potentially be used by other world builders when making similar games as well, so you could see your art appear in many games on Metaplace.

This is the art that Owen is looking for:

Land:

- Foot

Infantry

Mech Infantry

- Tires

Recon

Rocket Launcher

Missile Launcher

- Threads

Tank

Medium Tank

Large Tank

Personnel Carrier

Artillery cannon

Anti-air cannon

Air

- Fighter

- Bomber

- Battle Copter

- Transport Copter

- Stealth fighter

- Bomb

Sea

- Battleship

- Cruiser

- Lander

- Sub

- Repair boat

- Aircraft Carrier

The art specifications are as follows:

• Each with sprite sheets for idle animation and movement animations in the 4 cardinal directions, with each frame being 64x64 with transparent background.

• Each sprite would have to have at least a sizeable portion of the unit to be tintable on the red channel to show team colors (red, green, yellow etc.), and be set up so that the tinting is mostly bright (closer to the 255,254,254 end of the scale on the red channel).

If your art is used by Owen, you would get recognition in his credits screen. If you have any questions please email him directly. Thank you!

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Posted on Monday, June 30th, 2008 at 6:02 PM PDT

What are your favorite games?

To begin this week's blog post, I'd like to direct everyone to a mini-contest that is being held in our forums. One forum poster, The Aether Knight, has put together a competition to see who can make the best web page banner advertisement for Metaplace. There are no specific size restrictions, but it should be designed to fit either on a sidebar or the top or bottom of a web page. Any of the art in our media kit or elsewhere on the web is available for your use in creating banner ads. Show off your art skills and post your submission in this thread!

Here at Metaplace, the majority of us are gamers. We are passionate about games - everything from console games to PC, to board and card games, to tabletop roleplaying and strategy games. I asked our team members last week what their favorite game genre is and if they can give a couple examples of titles they love to play. Here are some responses:

"My favorite game of all time is Final Fantasy VI. Intriguing characters and believable character development are my favorite element of storytelling, and FF6 had my favorite cast of 14 characters." -- Adam "sunetos" Smith, Software Engineer

"I’m a longtime hardcore shooter style game player, playing mostly the Rainbow 6 series. Being that I was playing them before the dual analog sticks became the “cool” thing, I’m a solid believer in using a mouse to play FPS’s. BOOM HEADSHOT!" - Tristan "Actionsketch" Michael, Intern/"Art Ninja"

"I’m a dedicated tabletop RPG’er, but I’ve never been able to get into RPG-style video games. I think I played WoW for about forty-five minutes before shrugging and going back to working on my Exalted character. I do love all of the music-and-rhythm based video games, though. I’m finally mature enough to proudly play DDR in public, and I will rock out on Rock Band, Guitar Hero, and Karaoke Revolution any day of the week!" - Claire Vannette, Office Manager/'Nerd Wrangler'

"I like a lot of sorts of games. Puzzle games, FPSes, platformers, and of course MMOs." - Raph Koster, President

"My favorite genre is RTS. I got hooked on Red Alert and the whole C&C series, though my favorite game of all time is Age of Empires II. There’s nothing quite like watching a friends reaction as their city burns after a perfectly matched 3 hour game." - Andy Whelan, Web Developer

"Diablo 2. as weird as it is, these days i’m a huge fan of the incrementally-time-digestible grind. reward systems broken down into the smallest parts possible and immediately accessible. xp, xp, drop, xp, drop, sell for cash, item upgrade, xp, xp, ding! woot!" - Christopher "m3mnoch" Chapman, Senior Software Engineer

"Grand Prix Legends. It is a PC game that most accurately simulates the physics and dynamics of a real 1967 Formula One season." - Andy Ault, Web Developer

"I’ve traditionally been a PC gamer, although lately I’ve been spending a lot of time in front of an Xbox 360. I typically enjoy RPGs, shooters and racers." - Rob Hauch, Senior Artist

"I’ve spent countless hours slinking in the shadows in Thief II, knocking out hapless guards with my trusty blackjack. Outwitting the enemy is so much more satisfying than outgunning the enemy. Best game ever." - Mike Caloud, Software Engineer

"For me it’s definitely any dungeon crawler or adventure with a quest. I started back with the original Adventure, Scott Adams and Infocom games. And over the past 30 years, I’ve played almost everything with a storyline that’s been released, from ‘King’s Quest’ to ‘Eye of the Beholder’ to ‘Oblivion’. I absolutely devour anything with a puzzle." - Johnny Waitt, Content Developer

"I enjoy all kinds of games, from simple side scrollers to advanced multi-month MMORPGs.  Whatever the game, multiplayer is really a necessity these days.  I love games that make you think and strategize to beat the enemy, either alone or with a team.  I am very opinionated against games that are purely  ‘item based’.  It is so much more respectable when a players cunning, timing, coordination, and creativity determine the outcome of the game." - Ben Taller, Software Developer

"I'm a huge JRPG fan, preferably turn-based. I also enjoy action RPG's, board/card games (like Munchkin!), tabletop roleplaying, and games like Rock Band, Guitar Hero and Singstar. Hopelessly addicted to playing and reading about MMOs, and quite infatuated with the 360 in all its glory." - Tami "Cuppycake" Baribeau, Community Manager

"I think of all game genres, I enjoy Board Games the most. Some people have an aversion to video games, but are willing to play board games. It's always nice to sit down with a group of friends or family members and play." - Jeff "The Intern" McNab, Content Developer

"My favorite genre of game is JRPG. Turn-based combat is my preferred style, but I enjoy other combat systems as well. I’m currently playing Brave Story: New Traveler for PSP. Before that, I played Lost Odyssey for Xbox 360. Most of these games follow very similar design, but I still love to play them all. :)" - Kia Jessen, Associate Producer

"My favorite genre of game is the “building” type – Alpha Centauri, Master of Magic, Civilization, Master of Orion, and similar. It’s incredibly satisfying to watch a powerful empire build up from nothing, learn advanced secrets, explore the (world / galaxy / etc), and smash enemy armies! My favorite in this genre is probably Alpha Centauri (+ expansion), as it allowed so many variations in playstyle and gave a ton of options for customizing your empire." - Patrick "Tachevert" Ferland, Content Developer

"I started to answer this question many different ways (AC Darktide, TradeWars 2k2, AOE2, DragonRealms..) and I can’t pick a favorite game, or even a favorite genre. But I think looking at my top few the theme is mystery and depth, In AC you didn’t always know the level of who you were fighting, trade wars was huge and you had to keep notes, AOE2 took years to master and in Dragonrealms every aspect of the game had a trick to it." - James Gauthier, Senior Software Engineer.

What are your favorite kinds of games? Come post in our forums and let us know!

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Posted on Monday, June 16th, 2008 at 3:47 PM PDT

Congratulations Raph!

It is always great to see one of your own being granted an achievement for their hard work.   This is why we were thrilled to see our President, Raph Koster, featured as #9 in Beckett Massive Online Gamer’s Top 20 Influential People in MMO Video Games of 2007.  The article talks about Raph and others such as Min Kim (Nexon), Sanya Weathers (GuildCafe and formerly Mythic Entertainment) and Richard Garriot (NCSoft) and how their contributions and influence have helped shape the industry. 

In additional news, Raph’s entertaining game design book titled A Theory of Fun has been chosen for spot #9 in GameInformer’s Top 10 Video Game Books of All Time.   The article states the following:

“Through an often hilarious mix of academic discussion, first-person anecdotes, and hand-drawn cartoons, Koster brings the reader closer to understanding what role games of all sorts play in human life and what we mean when we say something is “fun.””

Unfortunately the book is sold out worldwide, but Raph has been working on making more copies available to the public.  If you’re interested in reading A Theory of Fun, there are often used copies for sale on Amazon. 

Congratulations Raph!

In broader Metaplace news, we were selected as one of the winners of the OnHollywood100. This is a list of companies that "have emerged in an exciting year in the world of entertainment--a year in which the old business models came crumbling down as writers took to the picket lines, musicians ditched their record labels, and breakout creative artists turned to venture capital for funding".  We are honored to be granted a place on that list.

Check back soon for a fun blog post about our developers and their favorite types of games!

Tami "Cuppycake" Baribeau

Community Manager     

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Posted on Tuesday, June 10th, 2008 at 12:41 PM PDT

Metaplace Badge Survey

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Posted on Thursday, May 22nd, 2008 at 4:45 PM PDT

Community Spotlight - Tile Tactics by Owen

This week's Community Spotlight is Tile Tactics, a strategy game made by Owen, an active forum member and alpha tester.

Can you tell us a bit about Tile Tactics?

Tile Tactics was originally a PHP browser-based territorial strategy game I had been creating, which I decided would be a good first project to try and port over to Metaplace. The original game involved claiming and holding ownership of valuable land, which was defined by the value/rarity of the resources held in those tiles.

I've been taking what was essentially a turn/action-point based asynchronous multi-player game and trying to turn it into a Real-Time Strategy game, which was now possible thanks to the Metaplace servers. So at first I had been working on including some essentials for RTS play that were not currently available, such as double-click support for better mouse controls, window unit selection etc. I've also begun working on the basics of unit creation, ordering units & territorial control.

How long did it take you to make this world?

Well the metrics for my world tell me I've been in there almost 70 hours, but I'm convinced it must be much more!

Although the vast majority of that time is probably spent just staring at the screen wondering how I'm going to approach a particular problem, or going back and trying something a different way.

What has been your favorite part about working with Metaplace so far?

It's been said before but the community is great. Just the other day in the alpha chat room we were discussing with the Devs an aspect of the server what was holding me back and I was unsure how I was going to work around it. A few minutes later Dorian came back and said they had made a change to that system so I could continue on as I was going! Needless to say I was very pleased with such rapid feedback.

Where did you obtain the art for Tile Tactics?

The art all came from the assets I created for the original game, which were intended to be a simple as possible.

I could say it was all created on a "pixelated theme" to reflect the blocky nature of the original grid based map... but really, the easier to draw the better.

Did you work alone or collaborate with others?

I've worked alone, but have had the help of other testers when needed. It's great to be able to just go into the chat room and herd the guinea pigs into my world to try and break stuff!
I've also tended to script everything from scratch, in order to try and get to grips with MetaScript/Lua, but I'm sure I'll be making use of the module market to add features to my projects in the future.

If not finished, what else do you have planned your game?

I've had requests from some other testers to export some of the elements I've made as modules, such my mouse-click manager and unit selection scripts, so that they can use them in their own worlds. So I'll be getting rid of some bugs and cleaning them up to be exported at some stage.
As for the game itself, it is currently very much a prototyping world at this point, but I'd like to be able to get it to the stage where it can be a persistent-world territorial game with a close resemblance to the original 'design'.

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

I'm focusing everything on Tile Tactics at the moment, but before I even got into Alpha I said I had wanted to take Uberspace and turn it into a Team Fortress type game. So I think that might be what I'll have a go at next, unless someone beats me to it and makes Uber-Team Space-Fortress before me!

Can you tell us a bit about yourself?

My name is Owen Canavan from Ireland. Originally an engineer, moved over to IT, and I'm now pondering the possibilities of getting into game design, so Metaplace is a great way to explore that and actually make some games.

I've been following MMO development since the pre-release SWG days and began to teach myself programming with PHP running a SWG guild site.

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Posted on Thursday, May 15th, 2008 at 11:20 AM PDT

Cuppycake's Metaplace Journey - Part 2

At this point in time, Ponyplace was nothing more than a flamboyantly colored background of grass and rivers (made completely of tiles that were available for free on the web) with a gaudy orange and pink pony plopped down in the middle. Not much of a game yet, but I could clearly see the vision of where I wanted Ponyplace to be. The question was, how do I get there?

The first thing that I knew I needed was movement, crucial in making Ponyplace a game rather than a slide show. This was where I was about to start my intimate romance with scripts. *cue dramatic music* At this point I wasn’t familiar at all with templates, but knowing about them now makes this a lot easier to explain – so I’ll attempt to do so.

A template is really a pretty simple concept that took me a little bit of time to comprehend, so I’ll try to define one in terms that will make everyone understand. Basically, every object in your world has a template. It isn’t necessarily its own unique template (for example, every gnoll in your RPG can be from a gnoll template) but every object needs one. What this means is that if I make a gnoll template, and make it so that gnoll has 40 hitpoints, and give it pink hair – every gnoll that I place down in my game using that template will have 40 hitpoints and pink hair. If I want an ogre instead of gnoll, then I make a new template called “Ogre.” Templates are the cookie cutter for all the different cookies I’ll want to put in my game.

Now that I’ve given a little primer, I’ll explain how I made my pony move. Right off the bat I thought to myself, “How the heck will I come up with the code to make my pony move!!??one11” but it proved to be quite simple. We have this awesome resource called the Metaplace Wiki that has an entire section dedicated to code snippets. These are little pieces of rad functionality that I can completely rip off (read: steal) by coping and pasting it into my world. There happened to be one named “Simple click-to-move” and since I like simplicity – I stole it.

-- Inputs and commands
Define Commands()
(1)  MakeInput('Click on terrain to move to destination.',
       'mouse-terrain', 'click', 'none', 'slide_terrain')
(2)  MakeCommand('slide_terrain', 'Slide to destination on terrain.',
       'x:float', 'y:float', 'z:float')
end
 
-- Commands
Command slide_terrain(x,y,z)
(a)  distance = math.abs(x - self.x) + math.abs(y-self.y)
(b)  slideTime = 350 + distance * 75
(c)  SlideObject(self, x, y, z, slideTime, 1)
end 
 

There’s the code. Daunting, isn’t it? It’s really not that scary – but I remember being TERRIFIED by this. Let’s break it down a bit.

Let’s start with the second section which is the Commands section. This is the real meat of the script; the part that actually makes the avatar walk around. The first line (labeled with an “a”) just calculates the distance between where you’re currently standing and where you click to move. The “b” line calculates the time you should take to move in, or the speed. The third line, “c”, actually moves the object. SlideObject is a built in function that my world will already understand as long as I give it the right parameters. You’ll notice there are 6 parameters (self, x, y, z, slideTime, 1) and I could explain each one – but this is already a lot more technical then I wanted it to be.

The first section is the Inputs and Commands section. Line 2 just makes a command named “slide_terrain” and line 1 makes it so that command is executed whenever you click the mouse. Easy! Less than 15 lines of code and now every single person who plays Ponyplace will be able to move.

So I opened up my player script and plunked this chunk of code right down inside it. I saved the script (which checks for any script errors – luckily I didn’t have any errors or I’d blame someone else for them). My player script comes automatically attached to the player template, but I double checked it just to be sure. I tried to click around in my world and nothing happened.

Oh! Silly me, I forgot to change my world to “play” mode. Worlds have two different modes when you’re in the tools – “Build Mode” and “Play Mode”. A simple button click toggles the two modes, but while you’re in build mode it makes it so that your scripts don’t function so that things aren’t moving around while you’re working on your world. I changed to “Play Mode” and clicked around. Nothing happened. I swore.

After swearing a lot, I decided to just restart my world to see if that would fix it. It did! (Turns out I could have just reloaded my user instead of restarting the whole world, but I hadn’t learned that yet). My pony could now glide gently around the pasture by clicking the mouse. It was incredible! I have never felt so triumphant in my life. After prancing around the office and proudly proclaiming that I am the best programmer who has ever worked on Metaplace – I came down to earth and realized that I hadn’t REALLY done anything other than copy/paste a script. It still felt amazing and made me want to do more and more. After learning how to make my pony walk, it was only minutes of work to learn how to make the pony rear up on its hind legs when you hit space bar. Hitting “E” for eat, made my pony put its head down to the ground. I imported a galloping sound for when the pony ran, and a munching sound for when the pony eats. It was simple and awesome.

I quickly announced to everyone in the office that I have created a masterpiece and that they should come check it out by pasting them a URL right to my game. I had 5 or 6 people in Ponyplace at once, everyone an exact orange and pink clone of my pony (those thiefs!). Everyone could click around and move because they were all “players” and the player template had a player script that contained my movement code. All little objects running around my world, instantly multiplayer with all the same abilities. Watching everyone run around galloping, eating, and rearing up on their hind legs was an exhilarating feeling. It wasn’t much, but I had made my first epic game within Metaplace.

Tami "Cuppycake" Baribeau

Community Manager

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Posted on Monday, May 12th, 2008 at 4:22 PM PDT

Community Spotlight - The Peon by Jeff McNab

This week's community spotlight is on "The Peon", a type of Real Time Strategy game created by Jeff McNab.

Can you tell us a bit about The Peon?

In The Peon, players take on the role of lowly peasants in a medieval city who travel between various zones collecting ore, wood and grain. These resources are then deposited in the city. The resources are used to increase the size of the city, granting bonuses to all players, along with being used for the local city's defenses. Player's increase their capacity to harvest and carry resources each time they deposit resources in the city , similar to experience gained in more traditional RPGs. The players all have to work together, harvesting the various resources, in order to make the city flourish and grow, along with keeping an invading army at bay.

How long did it take you to make this world?

While I haven't kept good notes on exact figures, I would guess that it's somewhere between 35 and 50 hours. The majority of it was spent on art assets, since I've been hand painting most of them. For instance, I spent about 12 hours of time creating the player sprite because of the various angles he needs to face. I would say I've spent about 60% of the time on art assets, with 30% on scripting and learning various Metaplace functionalities and the last 10% on pre-production, a.k.a. thinking and writing.

What has been your favorite part about working with Metaplace so far?

The community. Hands down. Both employees and non-employees alike have such a strong passion for the product, and it shows. Getting help is extremely easy and people are more than willing to help out with anything you may be having questions about.

I also like the ease with which you can create virtual worlds. It really is as simple as "point-click-virtual world". The manner in which Metaplace allows game creators to get a working game up quickly with lots of functionality is just great!

Where did you obtain the art for The Peon?

I created all of it from scratch, so I guess the answer would be "my head". When I first started working on the art, I was playing around with a more painterly style using my pen tablet. Of course, this was only created after using "filler" sprites (circles and squares of various colors) while I played around with the game design.

Did you work alone or collaborate with others?

I worked alone on this project. I wanted to see how much I could do by myself. Metaplace is such an easy tool to use that this was not only possible, but actually easy to do.

If not finished, what else do you have planned your game?

It's definitely not finished right now. There's a couple of bugs in the player script, along with various other non-implemented aspects (like the invading army). Of course, lots of art assets to do. I've actually been toying around with the idea of changing the visuals completely for a more comical style of graphics.

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

There isn't enough space for me to tell you about all of the game ideas I want to play around with on Metaplace. The issue isn't ideas more than time right now.

Can you tell us a bit about yourself?

I'm a senior studying game design at the Savannah College of Art and Design. I've been interested in game design ever since I started playing desktop role-playing games, such as D&D, at the age of 8. I spent lots of time playing games and interacting with people through games. It's one of the reasons I have such a large interest in virtual world design.

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Posted on Thursday, May 8th, 2008 at 2:06 PM PDT

Cuppycake's Metaplace Journey - Part 1

So there I was, the freshly hired Community Manager for Metaplace.  It was last summer, and a lengthy drive across the country brought me to my first day on the job – my dream job!  I had never been so excited in my life.  What is better than spending every day submerged in games, with people who are deeply familiar with the anatomy of games, socializing with a community of future players who are just as passionate about games as you are?  So there I was sitting at my new desk, looking at my new shiny computer, and feeling a little apprehensive about my new adventure.  

Let me briefly inform you about my programming experience (or lack thereof).  I know a little bit of HTML, enough to format some text on a page.  I’d never ventured into the intimidating world of CSS or Javascript, but bold text and line breaks are a breeze!  As far as Lua goes, I’d taken a peek at several addons for World of Warcraft and learned how to tweak them a bit – but that’s the extent of it.  So when I heard that Metaplace worlds used a form of Lua called Metascript, I was a little worried about how long the learning curve would be for me.  Since my first task as a new employee was to start working on our public wiki, I started digging and becoming familiar with the API functions that I was documenting.  (Keep in mind, I had never heard of an API function in my life).  Some of them appeared to make sense at first, like SlideObject().  I mean, how hard could it be to slide an object from one place to another?  Well, that’s when I was introduced to things like arguments.  All of a sudden there are things like object ids, coordinates, and milliseconds.  Phew, I had some learning to do.

So I decided I needed an ambition.  In my interview before being hired, I was asked “What kind of game would you make on Metaplace?”.  I promptly told them that I’d make a game with ponies, of course *rolls eyes*.  I figured that combining two of my loves, ponies and RPG’s would be a great idea.  With that, Ponyplace as an idea and an inspiration was conceived.

I pulled up our build tools (which were pre-alpha at this point, not even on the web yet!) and started poking around.  I saw all sorts of options – things like templates, sprites, tiles, backgrounds.  Under templates, I noticed something called “player”.  In typical Cuppycake destructive fashion, I had a brilliant idea to delete the player template.  I figured I could make it later, right?  What good is having a template there that I’m not even using?  Well – I crashed my game server in a way that had never happened before at the company.  I’ve always been the master of first impressions.  It was Day 1 on the job, and I had already spilled coffee into my keyboard and blew up my first attempt at a game.  W00t! Luckily, our programmers here disabled the ability to delete your own player template pretty much right after I discovered it was possible.  Some testing really takes a n00b to find the obscure things that amateurs will try to do.

Since things were looking so good, I started out by learning about tiles.  I had watched Raph do demos of Metaplace already, and I remembered him uploading tiles from the Web and then painting with them across his world.  It all looked so simple!  My very first experience was with a free tileset that I found by doing a Google search.  I was pretty excited at seeing tons of search results for tilesets – it made me look forward to being able to skip the whole art creation process of making a game.  Away I went, uploading tiles and painting all over my world – deleting and restarting every few minutes to get used to using the different tools.  I laid all the tiles down and then I thought that perhaps I wanted some mountains and valleys.  I then tried to use the elevation tool to add some variety to my terrain, which was when I learned about view modes.

Apparently there are lots of different view modes that games can be built in.  There is an isometric view which I found looked really similar to games like Ultima Online, it was almost 3D.  Then there was a side view, and an overhead view.  I picked the overhead view because it was nicknamed “Zelda mode” and I figured that Ponyplace would be just as good as if not better than Zelda eventually.  I didn’t remember any mountains in Zelda, so I assumed that the overhead view didn’t support elevation changes (and I ended up being correct.)  

Now that I was familiar with painting tiles, I set out to find the exact tiles that I wanted to use for Ponyplace.  I was looking for something that would look good in a fantasy world, something fun and cute.  I ended up finding a generic fantasy tileset that worked perfectly.  There were grass tiles, mountain tiles, water tiles, edges of water tiles, and so on.  It was a blast to arrange the tiles to make my game background, which I learned is actually called a map.  I now had the background all ready to go to start work on the meat of the game, which was the pony avatar of course!

This was the part I was most excited for, putting my pony into the game.  I figured that since there were pages and pages of tileset results on Google, I’d be able to find a pony avatar that faced in different directions.  Man, was I wrong.  Apparently I was one of the only people in the world who was trying to make a robust, lush, equestrian world of exploration and intrigue, mixed with RPG elements like classic turnbased combat and a deep meaningful storyline (with ponies).  Completely baffled that there weren’t pages upon pages of search results to assist me, I decided I’d “make my own” and downloaded Paint.net.

 I am a very accomplished artist, so I combined all my skills that I learned at the four different art institutes that I attended.  It look all the talent I could muster to Google for My Little Pony and cut a pony out of a random image from the Hasbro site with the selection tool.  Not to mention how I slaved over the process of flipping the image horizontally so that I could have a left walking pony and a right walking pony.  And then, the bright pink and orange pony with palm trees on its butt was born:

(Editor’s note: This original art was removed because it’s not really all that original.  Remember folks, make sure to have permission before using art from the web and claiming it as your own!)

I uploaded the pony into my world, and figured out how to make the pony be my avatar.  When you first upload an image into a world, it puts it into a gallery of images called sprites.  Each sprite is given its own unique sprite ID to reference it anywhere else.  The player template (yeah, that pesky one I deleted earlier) automatically comes with a default sprite ID attached to it (right now it’s a stick figure).  All I had to do was open up the player template and change the default sprite ID number to the number of the pony I just put in.  Easy!  I now had a stationary object that resembled a hideous looking pony positioned in a brightly gaudy fantasy land.  Eventually I intend to switch the pony out for some original art, but this worked fine for prototyping.  Things were looking better by the end of my first day in my new job; I had accomplished the very first steps of creating what would eventually be the deepest role playing game the web would ever see.

(Stay tuned if you can’t get enough of the exciting adventure that Ponyplace promises to deliver!  Part 2 coming soon.)

Tami "Cuppycake" Baribeau

Community Manager 

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Posted on Monday, May 5th, 2008 at 11:12 AM PDT

Metaplace Community Spotlight - MPCards by Scopique

This week's community spotlight is switching it up a little bit, and highlighting something different other than a world. One of our testers, Scopique, has made a really neat XBox Live Gamercard-like signature image that dynamically displays the badges that users have earned within Metaplace. We liked them so much, that we're using them too! This is a unique spotlight because it displays the work also of another alpha tester, DrOffset, who provided the background art for the badges. Enjoy our interview with Scopique.

1) Can you tell us a bit about the badges you have made for Metaplace users?

The badges are dynamically created from the web service feeds provided for every MetaPlace Alpha user and include information such as worlds that were created by the user, the MetaPlace badges they've earned, and the avatar icon that the user has chosen for their MetaPlace account.

2) How long did it take you to make these?

It took only about two days for the first iteration, which is the index card style. Once that format was set and introduced, I created another, thinner version which is better suited to use as a forum signature. I already had code which interfaced with the web services, and some code which could layer different images, so it didn't take long to put the two together.

3) What has been your favorite part about working with Metaplace so far?

The people have been fantastic; everyone -- both the Areae staff and the community members -- are always willing to help one another. It's been great to see what the community has been doing with the tools, and a lot of that information is being posted for all to learn from and use.

Sometimes people can be really protective of their knowledge, but the Alpha testing has really benefited from all of the people who are willing to share their hard work with others.

4) Where did you obtain the art for the badges?

The user avatars, world and badge icons are on the MetaPlace servers and are available through a few of the many Web Service feeds provided by MetaPlace. The badges simply load the images from the web as specified by the web service feed.

5) Did you work alone or collaborate with others?

I worked alone in coding up the pages used to collect the images and generate the badge image, and Dr. Offset provided the background images and layout for the badges.

6) If not finished, what else do you have planned for the badges?

I'm still looking into adding mouse-over functionality to display the world names when you hover over the world images. I'd also like to create some other versions for use as forum avatars. Any other suggested uses are always welcome!

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

My main project is MetaPunk, a cyberpunk themed MMO that's getting a lot of positive feedback so far. We're only in the planning stages right now over at MetaPunk.net, but we've got a a few of the prototype systems in development right now.

We've got a lot of ideas that we're excited to develop for MetaPunk, and I think that because MetaPlace is powerful enough to allow us to build something that's feature-rich without us going into debt to third party sources, we can take a lot of chances that more mainstream MMOs simply aren't able to do. Whether or not the public likes it is another matter :D

8) Can you tell us a bit about yourself?

My name is Chris Smith, 34, and I'm a professional web developer living in New Hampshire with my wife Isabelle and our 7 year old daughter. I've been a gamer for over 20 years now, and have always wanted to create games, but haven't had the head for graphics programming. I'm looking forward to using MetaPlace to build MetaPunk, and to see all of the fantastic things people will do with it.

Thanks for the interview!

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Posted on Thursday, May 1st, 2008 at 3:54 PM PDT

Metaplace Stress Test

The stress test has come to a close.

Thank you all for participating, and please fill out this survey to provide feedback.  There is also a forum thread for chatter about your experience.

See you next time!

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Posted on Wednesday, April 30th, 2008 at 5:02 PM PDT