The Cloud Party team have gone quiet during December. Indeed they’ve gone so quiet that Chic Aeon posted in the Cloud Party forum about it. This is a measure of the fact that the Cloud Party team and recently that has meant Cyn (nee Linden) Skyberg has been regularly blogging updates. I was so concerned that I went in search of answers.
Now a good place to find answers is from pirates, you give them some grog and they talk, so I found myself at Yarr Bay.
Grr bloody Flickr! I had to opt out of the new photo experience to grab the HTML code, IFrames for sharing photos? Seriously? Anyway, where was I? Oh yes searching for answers. At Yarr Bay I found a treasure chest, with a pirate hat, but alas no answer as to where the updates have gone.
So next I made my way to a more sensible location, I headed for Suburbia.
The good thing about Suburbia is that you get curtain twitchers, people who watch what is happening in the street, but they had no answers for me. They did not know why people weren’t talking. One person suggested that it’s the season to be merry and to not worry. However by nature I worry, I would have to go to somewhere much more dark.
Therefore I headed to a land of monsters, a land where apparently PacMan finds himself in OrcLand.
This was a hazardous experience I can tell you, sometimes I don’t think you lot understand the danger I put myself in to get to the bottom of a story. I was chased all around this maze by these beasts, collecting pills as I ran and still I didn’t find the answer I was looking for. However the answer I was looking for was actually hidden in plain sight …. ok it was actually in the Cloud Party forum where Sam Th0mpson had posted:
“We see you’ve noticed how quiet we are. Things always seem to slow down around here this time of year, and this year is no exception. We’re going to pick it up a bit on the bug front over the next couple of weeks and make sure we are catching those. Be sure to use the in-world bug report feature, we try to follow the forums but sometimes bugs reported on the forums slip through the cracks.
Right now we are having another time of introspection while we figure out where we want to go next with Cloud Party. We will be talking with everyone more before the holiday break, so please be patient with us. Hope you are having a great holiday season so far!”
Cloud Party ticks many right boxes, it works from a browser, you can have a lot of fun for free, you can script there, the avatars have nice facial animations, they have nice voxel building tools, they accept mesh, they support materials.
One idea I have is to build a little village and then when you enter a build you get teleported to another build which shows the inside of a building. Anyone who has played a game such as Diablo III and many older games will be familiar with this concept. I haven’t got around to this yet but I know it will work because I have created a doorway between my test builds.
There are some things holding Cloud Party back, the lack of cashing out being one. However there’s also one thing you can’t account for and that’s being in the right place at the right time. Cloud Party is a wonderful concept. but it simply doesn’t currently have enough users. That’s my opinion, the creators of the world may feel it has enough, I haven’t spoken to them, but socially it feels a tad empty and this is a great shame.
Whatever direction Cloud Party takes in the new year, I hope it’s a prosperous one because there are some great ideas and concepts there and they deserve to be exploited for all the right reasons.
It does not allow adult activities, enough for me to not even bother to consider it!
Whereas I understand your concern, I don’t think discrete activities are going to gain any attention.
Same for me, which is too bad; the technology looks promising.