Blocksworld – Ciaran Laval

November 5, 2014November 5, 2014

Bad Juju Games Acquire Desura From Linden Lab

Desura has changed hands again with a press release from Linden Lab stating :

As has just been announced, Bad Juju Games has acquired Desura from Linden Lab.

Bad Juju has taken over all day-to-day support, maintenance, and ongoing enhancements to the Desura website and service platform. The Bad Juju team will be reaching out directly to developers with games on Desura and are happy to respond to any questions they may have.

Transitioning Desura to a new owner is great for Linden Lab and our customers, as it allows us to further enhance our focus on creating the ambitious next-generation virtual world, while continuing to improve Second Life and growing Blocksworld.

Desura is a fantastic platform for game developers and players, and we look forward to seeing it continue to evolve and grow, now as part of Bad Juju Games.

The post on the Bad Juju games website explains that this is not a suddent process :

Indie Game and Middleware Tools Developer Bad Juju Games®, today announced that it has officially acquired Desura™, a comprehensive digital distribution service for PC, Mac and Linux gamers from its former owner and operator Linden Lab®. The move comes after several months of coordinated planning by the companies to ensure uninterrupted operation of the Desura service as well as a comprehensive roadmap of new features that will significantly benefit both its users and game developers during the upcoming months and beyond.

Linden Lab has begun an ambitious project to create the next generation of virtual worlds, while continuing to improve Second Life®, and grow Blocksworld®. Transitioning Desura to Bad Juju Game ship enables the company to enhance the focus of its resources on these priorities, while ensuring that spirit of Desura’s original vision lives on and game developers and players on the platform continue to be well served.

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December 30, 2013December 31, 2013

2013 Reviewed

The challenge with a review of the year is to try and make it worth reading. There’s a balance between including information and including too much information. This year’s review is largely based on Second Life and my own posts, so there’s plenty of information that I will be missing. For those who want a more in depth review, Inara Pey has been reviewing 2013 too.

For me personally it was a difficult year, Reed, Dee, Izzy and TJ Linden all gave me wonderful support, even when I myself was more than a tad grouchy with them but I do appreciate the efforts they made to accommodate me.

This post is not as long as it looks, if you skip the pictures, links and embedded videos it won’t take as long to read as you may think at first glance. I did consider breaking this down in to different posts, as I did last year. However at the end of the day it is what it is, so it looks like it’s epic in length but it’s really not. However to aid people I’ve decided to go back to HTML school and create a table of contents! Hurrah.

Contents

January – March
April – June
July – August
September – December
Summary

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January 25, 2013January 25, 2013

Can The Blocksworld Team Create A 100% Honest Second Life Trailer?

Draxtor Despres over on Twitter pointed me in the direction of the highly amusing Blocksworld 100% Honest Trailer, which I’ll embed at the end of the post. These guys sure know how to make a video and with a bit of prompting from Torley, we could be cooking on gas with a Second Life trailer on similar lines.

The video tells us that Blocksworld is : “From the country that gave you Minecraft and the country next to the country that invented Lego” now this doesn’t work for Second Life, well except for Lady Sakai who was telling me the other day that she was fed up with people thinking Scandanavia is a country and that we should appreciate they’re different countries out that way, so Lady Sakai will be happy that the creators of Blocksworld differentiate, but there’s a lot in that 100% honest trailer that fits perfectly with Second Life.

“It’s the ultimate building game, but it isn’t really a game, but you build stuff.” Now come on, that works great for Second Life too! We often see people berated for calling Second Life a game, because it’s not really a game of course, but you can build stuff. They also describe Blocksworld as “The game that isn’t really a game … or is it?”

“You can build motorcycles, with awful cornering.” Again, this is a good fit! Vehicles in Second Life are problematic, yes they can be built, yes they can travel nicely along some roads but at some point you hit issues with sim crossings, rubber banding and fall off your seat.

“Blocksworld is a world full of green grass, blue skies and sharp edges” This works too, unless you’re somewhere like Insilico, where there isn’t much in the way of green grass or blue skies! However even Insilico has sharp edges.

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January 24, 2013

Linden Lab Empire Expands As They Acquire iPad Game Blocksworld

Linden Lab’s empire grows by the day, as they announce they’ve acquired the iPad game Blocksworld, the full press release can be read here. I may follow suit and issue a press release everytime I buy a new game … oh wait they haven’t just purchased the game to play in the Lab, they’ve purchased the whole kit and caboodle along with plans to globally release the game!

Rod Humble is quoted in the press release as saying: “Blocksworld is a great fit with what we do at Linden Lab, It’s a very user-friendly complement to our portfolio of shared creative spaces. We’re happy to have the Blocksworld team join Linden Lab and are looking forward to bringing Blocksworld to the App Store worldwide soon!”

I’m really pleased to see Rod Humble speaking, I wondered where the bloody hell he’d gone! I did wonder if he was in hiding due to the nightmare season Aston Villa are having. Anyway, the next question is, what the bloody hell is Blocksworld? This is a genuine question as I’ve never heard of it!

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