Three Things For You To Do Today

#1 - Watch this hella-cool video, and then go get the Mario Kart Kit and do a machinima version!

via Kotaku

#2 - Check out the latest Understanding Games. The third episode is out! If you haven’t seen the first two, click here. Anybody who has ever even considered making a game MUST watch these!

via Raph

#3 - See the latest The Escapist. This issue they focus on casual games, which pretty much describes the best games in Second Life (excepting the RPGs).

New Details Emerge on “Project: Top Secret”

The tens of thousands (soon to be capped off at 100,000) signed on as “developers” for Project: Top Secret recieved further details today. Specifically, we now know a bit about how the business model will work:

We’ll be making a very relevant massively multiplayer title. (Meaning hundreds of thousands of players, but to keep things under control, they’ll be playing in 6 person groups, with up to around 3,000 players per server.) The game will be free and yes, we will let you have builds along the way to experiment with.

[...]

Making a business model from selling items is actually quite an interesting design challenge (as you will see later.) This is how games in Asia are made, but you must understand that people only buy them after they like the game. If the game isn’t great, you won’t sell anything. (So this is a tougher business than just selling Console Discs or Cartridges. At $60 less than today’s games, I believe this model will be very popular in the future.)

The comparisons to SL are a obvious: a free-to-play game funded by corporate sponsorship and the transaction of in-world items. I don’t mean to imply that this is any kind of replacement for Second Life, but there are financial parallels here that may help us to understand how to take advantage of the SL environment a bit better.

The numbers are rather significant considering what the major complaints about SL are. We generally worry about not being able to fit more than ten people into a sim before suffering major lag, but here is this “major MMO” proposing 6 people at a time, tops. Granted, they’re talking about running the equivalent of 500 sims per server, which is a major expense, but it does begs several questions:

1. Have we seen the limits of what can be accomplished with a full-sim game yet?
2. Is it feasible to run a full sim, or a series of sims, supporting a low number of players if we could guarantee full occupancy?
3. Exluding casinos and RPGs, are there any full-sim game spaces (sims exclusively for play) maintaining a profit in SL at all?

I’m going to be conducting a major census of games in Second Life soon (check back on the blog), which may help to answer these questions. In the meantime, what other questions should we be asking? Are there other lessons to be learned here?

Understanding Games

I’ve decided to start featuring some of the things I find around the net about game design, but only when they are truly, truly kickass.

Understanding Games falls into that category. Check ‘em out:

Episode 1

Episode 2

via Raph

Hogan’s Alley

Yesterday I told you about a neat Skeeball machine and compared it to one that wasn’t so neat. When a games obsessoid like me sees a game cutting through the regular SL issues this effectively, he follows up. Thus, I spent a good deal of time going through Seven Shikami’s many game builds and I’m going to spend pretty much the rest of the week telling you about them.

Basically, it has become Seven Shikami fanboy week.

“Hogan’s Alley” was one of the original 18 launch titles for the Nintendo Entertainment System, and is confirmed for Virtual Console (on the Wii). What many people don’t realize is that it had enjoyed life as an arcade classic even before this, and represents a bit of a genesis for all shooters that followed.

In the Second Life adaptation we get the same graphics and sound as the NES version, but in an arcade cabinet. Starting a game is easy and gameplay itself works really well. As a matter of fact, the only delays in the game were between rounds. When you click on one of the bad guys, the game instantly registers the hit! No lag!

As soon as I played this I knew I had to have a copy for the Games Park. I’ve played this one dozens of times and find myself coming back to it over and over. There’s something so satisfying about a shooter that just plain WORKS, with no extras and no gimmicks.

You can check it out in the clubhouse, upstairs. It’s just a beauty.