Posts Tagged ‘WebbliWorld’
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New Game: Webbli Racers is live!
19th Dec 20093I’ve talked before about the kids virtual world called WebbliWorld that myself and the Aardman Digital team built. Well it’s been an extremely busy 4th quarter for us as we’ve been releasing hundreds of in-world updates, as well as producing a really excellent racing game called WebbliRacers:
The game has a dual purpose, and two versions exist. One to be released “into the wild” to entice new visitors to the world. And a full version that lives within WebbliWorld which has all 4 tracks and a comprehensive (and fun!) achievement system built into it. Do well and you’ll unlock special items of clothing to wear. Do very well and you can unlock items to decorate your pod (house) with. Do really well and you’ll get awarded special trophies to show-off to your peers 🙂
The game was developed by Julian Scott (of Drift Runners fame) with art and animation by the Aardman Digital team. It’s a really beautiful game, and takes the unique and wakky style of WebbliWorld and uses it to full effect as these screen shots show:
Track 1 – The cute little traffic cones blink and change colour when hit
Track 2 – Take the hidden routes for extra coins
Track 3 – Oh I do like to be beside the sea side!
Track 4 – Looks so yummy be careful not to lick your monitor!
I urge you to try it 🙂 You’ll need an account on WebbliWorld, but that’s a 30 second process and is 100% free. Once you are in-world click the map icon on the menu and look for the arcade machine on the left-hand side. There you’ll find the “WebbliWhizzers” zone, which is the in-world leaderboard and place to play WebbliRacers.
The game has so many nice little touches, from the skid marks, puffs of smoke, jumps, extreme driving bonuses and excellent animation. Lots of what looks like 3D animation (spinning coins, rotating traffic cones) were in fact all hand-animated by the ever talented Robin Davey directly in Flash.
The 4th track is my personal favourite. Originally it was going to be a volcano level, with lava and tikki statues and the like. But it was rightly decided this was a little too dull for WebbliWorld, so the idea of a “chocolate mountain” was born. So the whole track winds around caramel, marshamllow, chocolate and sticky oozing syrup volcanoes. When you drive through the goo you leave a beautiful messy trail behind:
Click here to visit WebbliWorld – I look forward to seeing you on the leaderboard 🙂 and if you see “WebbliMunro” in world, come over and say hi!
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Read our Aardman Digital profile in .NET magazine
11th Dec 2009
Issue 197 (the super shiny golden Christmas one) of .NET magazine has a two page spread featuring yours truly, and the rest of the awesome team at Aardman Digital. They fired various questions at us about the work we do, which myself, Dan and Gav answered. There’s also a mini showcase of our projects including a few of my games, WebbliWorld and two of Chris’s games he developed for us.
Feel free to download the article (2 page PDF file, 160KB). Sorry about the image quality, it’s pretty low. But you’ll get the general idea!
I know that “print is dead” (yadda yadda) but it’s still nice to see yourself featured in something real and tangible. And I’m a sucker for magazines 🙂
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WebbliWorld is live!
23rd Jul 2009
After a manic “finishing off” period the brand new version of WebbliWorld finally went live today. It’s out of beta and open to everyone!
We’ve added loads of cool new features including a huge stack of new items, pod colours, t-shirts, hair styles and more. The in-game currency is working and you can buy new items for your house (or yourself).
Lots of other little fixes, updates and changes were added – but best of all did I mention that it’s LIVE! Almost a year of work and now the general public can charge around and explore for themselves 🙂
There will be a special promo video going up on the home page tomorrow, but in short feel free to register and play (especially if you have young kids who may enjoy it).
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WebbliWorld Public Beta is Go!
10th Jul 2009Today was pretty momentous for me to be honest.
We finally, finally, FINALLY launched the true public beta of the kids virtual world I have been working on since December 2008.
Called WebbliWorld it’s aimed at young kids (5 years+) and offers a hybrid Flash / HTML multi-user world. You can run around the Flash world, chatting, playing and customsing your space. While checking out the new site content through HTML links. It works in a similar manner to Whirled really.
You can access the beta at http://beta.webbliworld.com
Feel free to register and play. You will need to have your account manually approved before you can “buddy” with other people in-world, but the moderation team are working flat-out this weekend to ensure there isn’t much delay.
While it may look a little “sparse” at the moment, there are some really cool things coming on-line shortly (yes, including games!)
The Technology
It’s built on ElectroServer 4.0.7b, which the ElectroServer team supported excellently. There were quite a few issues with http connections that they worked diligently to resolve for us, so hopefully other ES users will benefit from those fixes too. We’re running on a pretty meaty server that should be able to cope with thousands of connections.
We had a soft launch of the site today, promoting it just on a few dedicated forums that Aardman run (Shaun the Sheep and Wallace & Gromit) and we’ve seen a flurry of users registering, walking around and chatting. This is the first MMO world I’ve built, so there was something quite magical about seeing a room full of users all charging about, that knowing that they weren’t fellow office staff 🙂
Development has been a truly mammoth task for me. I did all the AS3 code, platform design, server plugins, all of the AMFPHP gateway work, web site php/html/css/javascript, MySQL structure, stored procedures, debugging tools, logging tools, numerous utilities and admin systems… the list goes on and on! Now you can see why I’ve been so utterly frazzled and haven’t released a new game in the past 4 months 🙂 Thankfully a few weeks ago we hired a really good AS3 developer to help with the project, and his input has been invaluable. You can see a lot of his handiwork in-world, and in the exciting new features we’ll release soon.
Feel free to register and have a play. There are lots of hidden things in there. Click around, as lots of objects do stuff you may not expect. At the very least please edit your pod 🙂 Wake the pod up by clicking it, then click the “Edit” icon on your toolbar to start placing items. Feel free to post screen shots of your pod designs here!
Oh and if you see “WebbliMunro” charging around the world – that’s me.
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