Games – Page 2 – Ciaran Laval

September 15, 2015

Electricomics – An Open Source Comic Book App For Creators And Readers

Moving away from traditional virtual worlds for a post here, one of my favourite subject matters concerns story telling, in all its forms. On that theme I bring news that graphic novelist Alan Moore, has teamed up with his own daughter, Leah and Ocasta Studios to produce a new Open Source comic book app for the iPad, Electricomics.

Alan and Leah are no strangers to storytelling. Amongst Alan’s work are titles such as Wathcmen, V For Vendetta and From Hell. Leah and her husband John Reppion also have plenty of work to their names including titles based around Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Who … not in the same story I should add, although there’s actually potential there.

So what exactly is this app, you may be wondering? Well the basic blurb tells us that Electricomics :

is a digital comics reader app, which gives you free access to innovative digital comics by some of the best writers and artists in the business.

However in terms of the project as a whole there’s far more to it than that. In a blog post announcing the launch of the app, they announced :

Coming very soon, you will be able to go to http://Electricomics.net and download the creator tool to your desktop PC or MAC. It lets you lay out, and package your own comics, and read them in the app.

You can build Infinite Canvas comics, where the reader follows the story from panel to panel in whichever direction it leads. You can make Panel delivery comics, where you have control of the reading experience at panel level, every panel can be a reveal, and the page is fluid, changing.

The professional comics are a jumping off point, we want you to join in, and push forward what is possible for yourself.

So this isn’t just an app for readers, there’s a creation aspect to it too, but there’s more, the app will be Open Source :

Open Source code is used throughout, and full access to our JavaScript library, so if you can see a piece of functionality you could add to it, the code is there to use, and we can add it to the next update.

Whatever is added to Electricomics remains Open Source, and the property of the community using it.

Take it. Make with it. Improve it. It’s yours.

That means there’s a lot of potential here for people to build on the code and go in new directions.

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June 5, 2015

Desura Faces Uncertain Future As Bad Juju Games File For Bankruptcy

Desura, the digital distribution platform for gamers which Linden Lab sold to Bad Juju Games in November faces an uncertain future according to an article in Rock, Paper, Shotgun.

An article by Alice O’Connor, Digital Disturbance: Desura Owner Files For Bankruptcy, explains :

Following troubles and discontent with developers being paid late by Desura, the digital distribution store’s owner Bad Juju Games have filed for bankruptcy. A member of Bad Juju confirmed the bankruptcy filing with us today, but the company haven’t made a statement yet or said anything about what’ll happen with people owed money or games folks have bought or whether the store will continue, or… anything. More will follow, I’m sure.

The late payments issue had come to a head late in May and they were initially been blamed on issues such as not having an automated payment system. Desura released a statement to try and calm developers worst fears down. In the statement they said :

The second rumor, that we are going out of business, is also false. We are in fact exploring some very exciting new avenues in terms of partnerships and growth opportunities. The payout issues are not an indication that we don’t have the funds to pay. Bringing in the changes to the payout system, as well as new contracts being lowered to a $250 threshold will both help prevent this from being a recurring problem in the future.

What has happened to those partnerships and exciting avenues of growth is unclear.

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June 3, 2015

Gamefly Enter The Streaming Games Arena But Only For Amazon Fire TV

As many of us know, it didn’t end well for OnLive as they attempted to bring streaming gaming to the market. The service had potential and a lot of people enjoyed it, including those of us who utilised SL Go to enhance our Second Life experience. However OnLive were never able to turn that potential into profit and eventually they sold a lot of their IP to Sony and the ship sailed.

When it comes to a replacement for SL Go, Bright Canopy have been at the forefront of developing an alternative. However an alternative to OnLive’s gaming service hasn’t yet appeared.

However The Verge have reported : GameFly’s new streaming service wants to be Netflix for games :

We still don’t have a true Netflix for games, but that isn’t stopping companies from trying. The latest is GameFly — the rental service that sends you games in the mail — which today is launching a new video game streaming service. As part of the announcement GameFly revealed that it has acquired streaming company Playcast, which will power the new service.

Now to be clear, this is not OnLive 2, electric boogaloo, for a start, the service is currently only available for Amazon Fire TV, which I’ll be honest, I’m not really familiar with. However the service currently offers packages bundles of games for $6.99 a month, each bundle contains around seven games, The Verge article states.

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May 29, 2015

From Second Life Merchant To Improbable Technology

I’ve talked about Improbable before, Improbable is an exciting looking technology, still shrouded in a degree of mystery that could offer a solution for virtual worlds and MMORPG’s as well as much more.

When I blogged before I mentioned that one of their employees was Dave Hillier, once worked for Second Life. However now I’ve discovered another link with Second Life, albeit from a merchant angle.

Pammy Olson has published an article on Improbable over at Forbes : Meet Improbable, The Startup Building The World’s Most Powerful Simulations. This article expands more on the progress Improbable are making. Improbable’s founders, Herman Narula and Rob Whitehead feature in the article, they met at the University of Cambridge and the article provides some interesting background on the pair :

Narula wanted to code, teaching himself to write in C++ at 12. While studying computer science at Cambridge he met Rob Whitehead, a Liverpudlian who had paid his way through college by selling weapons on the virtual-world site Second Life.

I’ll be honest, I didn’t realise there was that much of a market for weapons in Second Life! There’s also the fact that both of them, initially at least, were very interested in creating a virtual world :

They began working on an ambitious virtual-world videogame in which you could drop an object, then log back in the next day and find it still there. When they couldn’t find software to help them scale up, they built the tools themselves.

“Eventually we realized the tech we were working on was bigger than the game,” says Whitehead.

This is not an unusual development, quite a few products have started life aiming to be one thing and ending up being another. However it’s interesting that the technology they’ve created is being welcomed by those who want to build MMORPG’s and it also appears, on the face of it at least, that it’s a technology that could be used for virtual worlds.

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May 1, 2015May 2, 2015

The Drax Files Episode 29 – InSilico

Episode 29 of The Drax Files World Makers takes us to the dystopian cyberpunk world of InSilico. The storyline on InSilico takes place in the 25th century, although it should be pointed out that Buck Rogers isn’t involved.

This is an absolutely fascinating episode because in five minutes it packs in so much about the disparate parts of Second Life that make up the whole. Here we learn about people who are storytellers, scripters, builders, landlords, tenants, roleplayers, photographers, bloggers, the curious and more all converging on this dystopian landscape.

We get to hear how the story of InSilico evolves every day, something which a virtual world environment allows. This is the power of user created content and in particular here, user created storytelling. This is an area oft overlooked when people talk about user created content. People think of clothing, buildings, scripts but storytelling can very much be user generated content too.

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