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I got my long-awaited invite to beta-test Metaplace, a web-app from a company whose president is the amazing Raph Koster, author of "A Theory of Fun in Game Design". See if this link works for you to visit my Metaplace. [Edited to add: It turns out the beta is not just for worldbuilding. Apparently you can't visit and play without being in the beta.] Metaplace demo on YouTube.
"What happened to Second Life?" I hear you ask. It's been fun to build things in Second Life, and my experience with it has been very positive and rewarding, but I stopped playing it when my only computer that could run it broke. Linden Labs simply and purely needs to stop increasing the resource requirements on their client software. Metaplace runs in a web browser and its default mode is made of isomorphic tiles instead of 3D graphics, so it's very easily cross-platform and accessible.
Like Second Life, it starts out as a basic sandbox where you could share or sell your original art resources. Unlike Second Life, it seems to be easier to modify the rules of your physics, user behavior, and other laws of your universe. (Correct me if I'm wrong.) If you have the scripting chops in Lua, you can customize your Metaplace to be Tetris, Pac-Man, turn-based map battle, real-time-strategy, RISK, chess, space combat, soccer, Super Mario Bros., a dungeon crawl, or whatever. Their users have ported more classic video games than they can count.
So naturally my first thought was to wonder if LojbanQuest could be implemented in my Metaplace. Metaplace happily lets you run their software on your own webserver. My idea is to have my design for a vocabulary flashcard program (we've been calling it Karda) that is cleverly disguised as a Tamagotchi game. Flashcards are "care and feeding" of a combat creature. That is what you take into battle to play the combat system which teaches grammar.
"What happened to Second Life?" I hear you ask. It's been fun to build things in Second Life, and my experience with it has been very positive and rewarding, but I stopped playing it when my only computer that could run it broke. Linden Labs simply and purely needs to stop increasing the resource requirements on their client software. Metaplace runs in a web browser and its default mode is made of isomorphic tiles instead of 3D graphics, so it's very easily cross-platform and accessible.
Like Second Life, it starts out as a basic sandbox where you could share or sell your original art resources. Unlike Second Life, it seems to be easier to modify the rules of your physics, user behavior, and other laws of your universe. (Correct me if I'm wrong.) If you have the scripting chops in Lua, you can customize your Metaplace to be Tetris, Pac-Man, turn-based map battle, real-time-strategy, RISK, chess, space combat, soccer, Super Mario Bros., a dungeon crawl, or whatever. Their users have ported more classic video games than they can count.
So naturally my first thought was to wonder if LojbanQuest could be implemented in my Metaplace. Metaplace happily lets you run their software on your own webserver. My idea is to have my design for a vocabulary flashcard program (we've been calling it Karda) that is cleverly disguised as a Tamagotchi game. Flashcards are "care and feeding" of a combat creature. That is what you take into battle to play the combat system which teaches grammar.
