New Pocket Gallery is Go!
Recently we launched our new gallery system for wild pockets. With the new gallery its easier than ever to publish your game and models directly to the web from your 3D Modeling program or the builder itself.
The gallery system is a super simple to use! It can currently supports both pockets and models, and version locks the published gallery version, so you can continue to develop without fear of breaking your published version. To get your 3D artwork into Wild Pockets follow the first set of instructions, to publish a pocket to gallery, check out the second.
How to publish your model to the web with Wild Pockets in Three Easy Steps:
1.) Create your model and download the wild pockets exporter.
2.) Export your model using the wild pockets exporter available for 3DS Max, Maya or Blender, Select the "Publish to Gallery" Checkbox in the exporter.
3.) After your model exports a web page will open on the "Publishing Page" of the wild pockets website. Fill out the page with your description, thumbnail image, set your privacy option for your model, and press publish.
The available privacy settings are:
- Public: Everyone can see this model everyone can use it
- Private: Only I can see this model and use it
- Preview: Everyone can see this model but only I can use it
Your model is published to the gallery! Now you can find it in the Wild Pockets Gallery, or on your user library in your user profile.
Resources:
3DS Max Exporter Documentation
How to publish your game to the gallery in Three Easy Steps:
1.) Create your game in wild pockets.
2.) Click the file button at the top of the buider, in the drop down menu click "quick publish".
3.) A new web page will open on the "Publishing Page" of the wild pockets website. Fill out the page with your description, thumbnail image, set your privacy option for your model, and press publish
You've done it! Your game is embedded in the web and shared with the community.
When you are ready to update your published version simply re-publish it, and it will automatically update the version number and just needs saved again.
We hope you enjoy the new gallery functionality and checkout what games and models have already been published on the Wild Pockets site. Please let us know what you think!
Drupal Meetup at Wild Pockets
Yesterday we were very happy to invite Ryan Price (@liberatr) of the Drupal Easy podcast and several other members of the Pittsburgh drupal user group over to our offices to check out our site (which is drupal tastic!).
Tony and I had a great conversation and were very happy to meet Ryan and learn a bit about podcast production from him. We're hoping to possibly use podcasting as a medium for distributing new tutorials and wildpockets information for developers.
We also got some sweet drupal logo iron-ons, as seen in Tony's hand on the right side of the attached pic.
It would be cool to have more meetups with the drupal community at Sim Ops in the future,
Wild Pockets at 2010 Global Game Jam
Well its been a hectic 48 hours... but its finally over. Myself, Brandon and Dan and a few friends competed in the 2010 Global Game Jam over this weekend. Over the past 2 days we built an entire game from scratch for the competition.
The rules were simple:
1.) You have 48 hours to build your game.
2.) You have to build your game around the theme of "deception".
3.) You must use one of three constraints in your game: "rain", "plain" or "spain".
An odd set of conditions to be sure, but the Global Game Jam is no ordinary competition. It's a world wide event that over two days had over 900 games submitted from over 30 countries! Thats a lot of game development, and thats the whole point. The whole point of this event is in the next 48 hours is to build a game that will change how people feel about games (hopefully for the good). Thats a big goal, which is why the event is so big! We have thousands of developers building hundereds of games, the idea is that a few will be a type of game we haven't seen yet. Or at least is something that puts a new twist on something more common.
Check out Eric Hardman's article about the game Jam for Gamasutra, also thanks for the below pics of the Game Jam.
Left, Wild Pockets Team working; right, the Entertainment Techology Center, host for the Pittsburgh regions event.
With that in mind we built a game that we thought was very "different" from anything we tried before. To be honest its tricky at this point to pick apart how we came to the all the choices that led up to our final game. But amid the blaze of rapid development that paved the way for Dr. Laser we made some early design choices that ultimately made the game truely unique:We want to make a game where the deception was a player's choice not an enemies programming.
1.) Deception is the player's mechanic not the enemies. We didn't want the game to be about the game decieving the player anything like that, ultimately we decided the deception element would be more of a part of the story than anything else.
2.) Story and game play connention. We wanted the game play to ultimately effect the outcome of the story in way that the player would want to play through again to see different outcomes. In the end we decided on a "good end"/"bad end" system that allows two endings for "chapters" of the story, while still allowing the player to progress to the next chapter. Later on it became obvious that we were making a "story" game for a game jam, a massive task in itself, that I'm proud to say we succeeded with.
3.) Make it look and feel like something unique. The end look of the game is very distinct, Brandon is mostly to thank for that. But there are also things like the unified look of the 2D and 3D art that also make this work. Also we made very powerful action momments when the game shifts from cutscene to gameplay modes. Some of this is audio, but also things like removing the hud from the game during game play help this.
In the end we finished the jam with something we're really proud of. Check out Dr. Laser! Adorara Ella un Robot? (Dr. Laser! Will She love a Robot?), and you will learn of a robots struggle to integrate with human society. You see Dr. Laser is a robot and as such is well versed in how to destroy humanity. But he is also in love, and through this confusion he has gained a tiny bit of "compasion" programming in his robotic brain. You actually play as this bit of compassion, fighting off his other violent robotic instincts inside Dr. Laser's brain. However, Dr. Laser is being forced to his limit by the strain of attempting to suppress his robot senses, now his partner wants to introduce him to her family. With the strain at the breaking point you must do everything in your power to make sure everything goes 'swimmingly'.
And the game is in Spanish... yeah... constraints...sorry to anyone who can't read Spanish! Also double appology to those that can... yeah...
So yeah, thanks for all your support and definately let us know if you like the game. There will likely be a follow up blog post about the Wild Pockets to Javascript communication we used to get the flash animations timed up with the game play, so look forward to that as well!
New Web Features Incoming!
With the new website out in the wild, it's time for a well deserved rest... Ah... that was relaxing. Now on to the next round of new features for the website! We have some great ideas for what sort of new things we'd like to add to the site, let us know if you see anything you like:
1.) New Forums
Well actually the same forums, but with a shiny new coat of paint! We're moving many of the old threads to new directories in an attempt to clean up the clutter that is the forum structure. We haven't decided completely where all this old content is going, but here is an example of something we're thinking: moving all the old game jam threads to a new "Competition" section. We're also adding a lot more prestige information, such as total number of posts and forum ranks! So if you're active in the forums we'll know, and down the road we can reward active forum members.
2.) Updates to Manual & Documentation
Again, not neccessarily the content, but definately the way you navigate it and get your information. We're considering a few different options, but one interesting one is add an "API" section to the manual for the same in depth function information that is in the "function list" in the builder. That way users who have problems with a specific function can comment there, and get help with it. We are also considering adding a wiki to the support section, the wiki would be an in-depth source for information about wild pockets. For example, you could have a wiki article explaining the concept of a "Pocket". The wiki could also be a section for users to contribute their own documentation to. If you've written your own API for a module, you can post it to the wiki so its available to the entire community.
3.) User Accounts
Ah finally some new content! The user account pages are due for a massive overhaul, the new pages have a completely new layout and some exciting new features! The most exciting is probably the new developer analytics section, which will allow developers to see how their wild pockets games are doing. Information like the number of Page Views, Page Activations, Game Starts, Time in Game and any custom points that they want to record will be available to track. We're also hoping to lay some foundations for things like user activity feeds, organic groups, and maybe even achievements!
4.) Gallery & Publishing
This is a very ambitious project that many details of which are still being worked out. While you can look forward to more concrete details in the near future, suffice to say this project will finally bridge the gap between creating great content in wild pockets, and sharing it with the rest of the community. We're actively looking for feedback about this functionality, so if you have an idea please let us know by sending us some feedback through the feedback widget on the site!
5.) Social Connectivity
This is really an amalgum of tasks related to adding new social elements to the site. In our interest to get users more connected to us through their other social networks, we're going to be implementing gigya, which will open the doors for users with accounts from other networks like: facebook, myspace, yahoo and many more! Users who already have accounts with these services can also benefit from gigya, by being able to share your experiences on the wild pockets site with your other accounts. Another service we'll be adding is twitter functionality, so users who are interested in sharing their status in wild pockets through twitter can opt into tweeting their latest user status updates. Finally, one other unique social project is related to connecting developers who are searching for team members to work on games. The idea is to give users who are looking for a team to join, or just help getting their game fixed find the help they need. If you have ideas about this sort of functionality, please send along your ideas.
Hope that wets your pallete for the future of the website. We'll be sure to go into more detail as these projects come to fruition, in the mean time please let us know what you think. We're always excited to hear back about what our community is looking for next on the site.
Welcome to the New Wild Pockets Website!
Building a community website isn't much different from building a battleship. Both have a designed role they must fill, both are built to be in service for a long time, but most of all at a certain point you have to put the thing in the ocean and hope it floats.
We have reached that day for this new website. Luckily we are really confident that this new site is going to VASTLY improve user experience on our site. We have completely reworked the visual look and layout of the site. The design is much more modern and contains all the features of the previous site and more!
Here are 10 favorite things of mine for the new site design (in no particular order):
1.) GetSatisfaction Feedback form!
If you have an idea, want to let us know about a terrible bug, have a question, or just want to say: "Hey, you rock"; this is your go to button. It sits idly on the left hand side of the screen waiting for you to click on it. Feel free to fill it out and send information on to us. In the future we're hoping to expand functionality with getSatisfaction to serve as a direct line of community support features.
2.) Enhanced Breadcrumbs!
We all love the back button, but sometimes you want to go back to a specific place higher up the navigation, or more likely you were linked to something and want to see more things in that category. With the new enhanced breadcrumbs content is nested cleanly and consistantly in a breadcrumb trail below the navigation. We are still sorting out some navigation pathing issues, so if you come across something weird please report it so we can iron out the kinks.
3.) Drop Down Navigation!
So pretty, and so useful! You can get the forum from anywhere in the website by going to "forum" under "community". Likewise we have links to all the major sections of the website in the navigation. This new much more horizontal navigation will help users get to where they want to go in the site in a single click, the way it should be! In the future we hope to add some more jQuery polish to the drop down states as well as likely modify the content in the drop downs as we get a better idea of what drop downs users are navigating to.
4.) Quick-tabs!
Many pages support new tabbed layouts on the right side. These tabs were provided by the quick-tabs module! "What is Wild Pockets?", "Getting Started!" and "Tutorials" all use them. This lets us categorize a lot more of the content on these pages so users don't get lost in cluttered lists and different information on the same page. Please let us know if you like the quick-tabs!
5.) New Events Page w/ Calendar!
This page was very boring on the old site, so thanks to Brandon we have a brand new shiny calendar element on the page! We're hoping to upgrade this page further in the future to sync with an actual company calendar, so events will automatically be added, modified and tagged based on what information is in the original calendar! This page is already much improved and it has an even brighter future ahead of it!
6.) Community Content + Content Types!
This is a bit of a odd one when you think about it, but we are now handling community content entries as a content type on the site! As opposed to before when they were just images with links. This new content type functionality will allow us to add some much more sophisticated ranking, sorting and publishing functionality in the future. In the short term, it means adding content to the community content section will be much easier and more dynamic. Look for more information about this section in the coming months.
7.) 960 grid system layouts!
A major part of our new layouts is related to moving the new site design to the 960 grid system. Without going to too much technical detail, suffice to say that it lets us lay things out the way we want things to layout out and when it doesn't we complain to Tony and he magically fixed them. One side effect of this is that we are now not natively supporting 800x600, to these individuals we appologize for the inconvieniance, but seriously its 2010 why aren't you using at least 1024x768?
8.) User Info Field in Navigation!
This is mostly a styling thing for now, but we have big plans for this particular part of the navigation. If you are logged in the field serves as a link to your user account, as well as the log out and pocket change links. If you aren't logged in the section is a big button enticing you to register for a wild pockets account. Seriously sign up! You can't ignore that big blue button just begging to be pressed! It compels you!
9.) Flash spash element on home page!
It should be the first thing you see when you land on the home page. While its general purpose is to catch your eye when you land on the site, there was a lot of consternation about the wording, functionality and even form factor. Eventually we came to a general concensus that this element is a spring board for new comers to the wild pockets site to have an idea of where to get started. In the future we are considering making a different flash splash feild for registered users which will contain information more relevant to them. For now, I just enjoy watching Brandon's amazing spinning cube animation.
10.) Administrator Menu!
Users will unfortunately never see this niffty new feature, but they will reap benefits from it. The menu allows the site mods to do our jobs faster, which in turns allows users to have a better overall experience on the site. Happy mods means a happy site, and a happy site means happy users (fingers crossed)!
We've been hard at work on the web site's new design for several months now, and while we have been very careful to weed out critical bugs and install powerful new features, we can't predict the future. So please, if you come across anything that seems... wrong, please let us know! We are committed to making this new site a massive success, and while we're only getting started with this launch we hope it will help your wild pockets experience that much better!
Wow that's a lot of stuff. Its also worth a mention to thank everyone associated with getting the website to this point. Thanks to Tony for all the amazing drupal-tastic web engineering and CSS, without him this site definately couldn't have been made a reality. Brandon for all the design and art direction for the site, if you can see it, you can bet its Brandon. Thanks to Ranger for lots of last minute server and engine related quirks, the site would be useless without the Builder. To Josh for helping resolve issues with User Authentication, and tons of other technical stuff. Thanks Eddie, who returned my call at the world beer-pong league championship to see if I needed something. To Shanna, Arron, Ian and Alex for tons of testing, feedback, and design discussion, the site really benefitted from your help. To Lisa and Emily for lots of wording/language corrections and refinements. To Mark for never stopping work on the Mac port... just wanted to put Mark in here somewhere... go Mark! And a very special thanks to everyone else who just sent us an email with a cool idea, site, reference or was involved in the creation of the site. I'm very thankful for all the help, and hope we can continue to rely on it as we continue to improve the site!