Update, February 19th, 2014: Creatorverse was discontinued by Linden Lab on February 19th, 2014. Links to the Creatorverse website have therefore been removed from this article.
They say a week is a long time in politics. While the same cannot be said of business in any way, shape size or form, Creatorverse has now been out on the market for a week, and so I thought it worthwhile to take a look at reaction so far.
And it all seems very positive.
Creatorverse
Creatorverse is One Of the Coolest Things You Can Do With an iPadwas the opinion of Kotaku.com on the day Creatorverse was launched. “With its simple bare-bones interface, Creatorverse requires a little fumbling about to get one’s bearings. So far I’ve managed to build a simple machine that keeps a ball spinning endlessly, achieving mastery over virtual perpetual motion,” the article goes on. “Thankfully I don’t have to rely on my own creations to amuse me. The game allows players to share their creations with the Creatorverse community, allowing others to download and tweak their designs to their hearts’ content. It’s an incredibly cool little toy …”
148apps.com were impressed with the app’s ease-of-use, “The interface is what stands out the most. It’s clean and crisp and the white canvas just invites users to start creating. Shape and line tools may be selected on the left. Once an object is placed, users can then drag the points to make different shapes or drag a color down from the top to fill it.”
They go on, “The simple drag and drop controls allow users to make animations with ease. While Creatorverse‘s unique sandbox style may mean it’s more fun for kids (or kids at heart), it’s the creative possibility that makes it so engaging. Whether uses wish to make a simple pinball-style game or a short animation, it’s a neat concept that lets users explore their artistic side.”
Update, February 19th, 2014: Linden Lab have discontinued Creatorverse. Therefore, links in this article have been removed.
Thursday November 1st, 2012 Linden Research Inc has officially announced the launch of Creatorverse for the Apple iPad. Announcing the launch, the Press Release reads in part:
Creatorverse is a two-dimensional shared creative space, a digital canvas on which you can build unique creations, set them in motion, and share them with the world to enjoy and remix. You become an inventor as you draw, stretch, shape, and color your creations, and then add joints, forces, motors, teleporters, and inputs that change how your inventions come to life on the screen. You can save your inventions locally or share them to the cloud for other users to enjoy and remix into their own unique creations. From the simplest bouncing ball to a car, a rocket, a pinball game or a beautiful piece of interactive art, the possibilities for creativity are endless with Creatorverse.
Sharing your creations – seen as one of the attentions for Creatorverse (image: Linden Research Inc.)
Interestingly, and prehaps learning from their experience with Patterns, Linden Lab have also launched a series of YouTube tutorial videos for Creatorverse in their own dedicated channel, some of which are also displayed on the Creatorverse website.
Given that Patterns did give some people initial issues with getting started, this may not be a bad idea, depending upon how complicated and capable the tools within Creatorverse are. As it stands, topics for the videos cover input to the screen, how to make various joints – distance, wheel, weld, etc., – howe to apply forces to objects, and so on; a total of 14 videos in total at the moment.
As Patterns users are being encouraged to upload videos of their activities within the Patterns universe, it’ll be interesting to see if / how users of Creatorverse may do likewise – and whether they will be encouraged to do so.
As with Patterns, the Creatorverse website is focused on community, with a community / forums area where topics can be raised, ideas exchanged, suggestions made and questions asked / answered. With Patterns, the forum area has been well received and quite well used; one assumes the same will happen with Creatorverse should it prove popular.
The ability to share creations is a major part of Creatorverse, and it is interesting to note that currently, there appears to be no dedicated area on the website for viewing other people’s creations. As the SHARE button is part and parcel of the Creatorverse application, one assumes that sharing and browsing creations must be handled purely from within the application itself. If so, it will again be interesting to see if a preview capability will be added to the website should there prove to be a demand for it.
Creatorverse is available at $4.99 in the Apple App Store. Unlike Patterns, this is a full release of the product, not an alpha or Genesis release, and so technically marks the first “full” release of a product by the company outside of Second Life – the Lab has stated that Patterns will not be released as a “full” version until late 2013.
Currently, Creatorverse runs only on the iPad, but it may well be made available on other platforms in the future – at least one recent interview with Linden Lab CEO Rod Humble has hinted at Creatorverse also being made available for the PC and Mac, and one assumes that if this is the case, an Android version may also be made available at some point.
Sadly, no reviews of Creatorverse are likely to appear on these pages, as I am not an Apple user.
Update, February 19th, 2014: Creatorverse, Versu and dio were discontinued by Linden Lab on February 19th, 2014. Links to their websites, etc, have therefore been removed from this article.
Looking through the pingbacks on my blog comments, I was curious to see one show up on the 23rd October 2012 linking to an article I wrote back at the start of the year. Curious at to why someone would be linking to an old article, I went to have a look.
Turns out the article linking to me is from Kotaku, a games-related blog run by Gawker News – and the article itself is an interview with Rod Humble. (which came to me via Kotaku’s Australian site) Needless to say, I was more than a tad surprised to have someone interviewing our own Rodvik linking to my blog (oh, be still, beating ego!), so I decided to have a read through.
The piece itself is obviously about the Lab’s new and upcoming products, and it gives some interesting insights into the thinking behind them.
“Just about everybody I know who isn’t in the games business or programming business comes to me with a game idea or a website, and the truth of the matter is, quite often, they can’t make it.”
the article quotes Humble as saying. He then goes on:
“There’s this big barrier. They look at something like C++ [programming] code and, frankly, it looks like a big equation. It just looks like gibberish.
“The more we can make tools that are just fun to use—all of a sudden you are making something you wanted—you can focus on the creativity than mastering this arcane set of symbols. We can hopefully bring more people into that fold of ‘hey, you made something!'”
Thus is the broad thinking behind Patterns, Creatorverse and the still-to-be-seen Dio and Versu, which are apparently going to be appearing something in the next month – if not before the end of this one, depending on how you read quotes from elsewhere.
Creatorverse itself comes in for some attention in the piece – Humble describes it as being his five-year-old daughter’s favourite game at the moment, and it is referred to as coming out “later this year”. Whether that is a result of the interviewer misunderstanding Humble (the interview was via ‘phone), or whether it is because the release date may have shifted while the wheels at Apple (or elsewhere) turn slowly, isn’t clear.
What is clear, however, is the novel way Creatorverse is pitched in the interview:
In the near future, his company will put out a program for iPad called Creatorverse, which will let people use shapes and physics to create basic 3D systems and, yes, games, then share them for anyone else to download and play. Think of making a game that lets you fling shapes into other shapes—your own “Slightly Mad Avians”, he offers as an example, if you get what he means.
Creatorverse
While Slightly Mad Avians could stand as a title in its own right (along with Perturbed Pigeons, a name Darien Caldwell suggested to me the other evening in an entirely unrelated conversation…), it’s nevertheless a curious hook on which to hang a description of Creatorverse – but an interesting one in terms of mental images….!
What is of greater potential interest, however, is the comments about the upcoming Dio and Versu.
Dio is described as: “A website that lets people create rooms out of their personal images and videos, connects them to other people’s rooms and lets people share the space.”
While it has previously been described as “A room creator, in which players can do everything from construct a choose-your-own adventure to develop an interactive wedding album,” and Linden Lab managed to accidentally give people something of a quick peek at an early iteration of a website connected to Dio back at the start of the year, the comment in the Kotaku piece implies that the websiteappears to be the product, rather than in support of it. It’ll be interesting to see how people react to this.
Versu, meanwhile, gains a little more flesh on the bones given in an interview with Giant Bomb, with Humble describing it as, “A platform that lets you make real interactive drama” by giving you “the ability to create characters within a story and then, thanks to the AI, see that “those characters will have emergent properties as you play through the story.” He goes on to admit that this is pretty ambitious and admits to an element of “Tilting at windmills” in order to bring it to a wide audience.
The article goes on to talk in more detail about Patterns, which many of us – and many more in the gaming community – are enjoying even in its nascent (or as Humble puts it, “not even pre-baked”) form. It also talks about Humble himself and his arrival at Linden Lab, which leads to a good mention of Second Life:
It makes perfect sense that Humble would wind up at Linden Lab, the company best known for the virtual world Second Life. It’s as successful a canvas for the communal creation of a virtual world as there’s been. It’s been a viable digital canvas for about a decade now has been populated by users who make their own buildings and vehicles, who design contraptions, contort physics, stage elaborate events, form societies, and pioneer the art of inhabiting elaborate second skins that express inner or otherwise impossible creativity and desires.
It’s a positive read, and well worth taking a few minutes out to read through.
Update, October 9th, 2014: Linden Lab announced that development work on Patterns has been discontinued.
In keeping with Rod Humble’s promise of rapid iterative cycles, Patterns received its first update on the 18th October.
Looking at Reactions to Date
Before getting down the the update, I thought I’d take a look at reactions to date. It is fair to say that overall, Patterns has been generally well-received in the “gaming community”, with positive comments appearing in response to articles about it, on the Patterns forum and forums elsewhere, together with a host of largely positive videos and tutorials being promoted to You Tube.
Within the SL community, the reaction has been somewhat more mixed. While many (myself included) have been willing to give it a chance and are happy – for now at least – to see where it leads and forgiving current shortfalls and bugs, others aren’t and have written it off before even the first update has arrived. Still others are loudly remonstrating that Rod Humble is pushing LL into something “it isn’t”, a “games company” with the subtext that it can only end in failure. Perhaps it will; my own view at this point in time is that it’s just too early to tell, although I remain of the opinion that diversification could be beneficial to the company and SL over time.
But to come back to Patterns. Many of those who have been working with it have been flexing the overall building capabilities – and this has in some ways mirrored early usage of Second Life. While Those at linden Lab expected their world to be filled with the unusual, bizarre and unthought-of, most early adopters worked with prims in remarkably familiar ways: houses were very much based of real-world designs, etc.
Of course, Patterns is a much harder world to go directly to the fantastic as the physics engine isn’t so obliging to turn a blind eye to a stately mansion sitting atop a tree or floating over a mountain (not unless they are part of a protoworld to start with, anyway). Even so, people have been playing with recognisable builds – such as Damien Fate, and his lighthearted look at building a house.
Others have been looking at the question of vehicles in Patterns – and while axles per se are lacking at present, some have been having fun nonetheless…
Rtan Slattery’s “SWAGON”, as seen in the Patterns community forum
I’ve been playing Patterns since it came out two weeks ago, and have to say I’ve found it buggy (not unexpected with an alpha release), very limited in terms of things to do (ditto for an alpha release), frequently repetitive (if only because for the last couple of days I’ve been reduced to vacuuming-up everything in sight….) – and oddly compelling and absorbing. The workbench / forge (or to give it its proper name, the Shaping Stone) has had me beavering away at what is / isn’t possible to build, and I’ve enjoyed experimented with different means of building bridges, ramps, stairways, etc while exploring in-world. More recently, I’ve been enjoying simply blowing this up (although I admit, creating “starene” bombs passed right over my head until Nalates Urriah pointed out one is built in the original promo video. Doh!).
So… what about the update?
A Word About Savesets
Before we get to that, a word about Patterns savesets – one I wish I’d read before launching into the update and building things :).
By default when starting the update, a player is starting over; this is a new version with a new world, so you’re essentially starting from scratch, which is a bit of a pain if you’ve collected a few tonnes of substances in your inventory or created a slew of custom shapes.
However, all is not lost. Providing you’re not too heavily into the update, you can re-load various elements from earlier sessions with Patterns (providing you saved your games) into the new version. This not only means you can revert back to just playing within the 0.01a world – you can load your inventory and shapes! The process for doing this is currently a bit complicated, but the indications are that future versions will included the ability to load data from previous versions etc.
In order to load-up data, you’ll need to access the savesets for the game. These are located in the following folders:
Note that if you have already played the update, you may also have savesets from version 0.01b. These are differentiated from version0.01a savesets by having a “2” in the filename.
To use a saveset file from 0.01a in your updated Patterns, all you need to do is add a “2” to the name so, for example: “data_ProtoWorld_0” (the world file) would be renamed “data_ProtoWorld2_0”. Note that this may overwrite any existing 0.01b file with the same name.
Lelani Carver pointed me towards a further interview with Rod Humble on the subject of new products which appeared in the Gamesbeat pages of VentureBeat on October 12th. The interview is pretty much what has been said elsewhere insofar as the new products are concerned, but there are some very interesting nuggets of information sitting within it.
Pride of the father: Rod Humble shows-off Creatorverse (images coutesy of VentureBeat)
Patterns and Creatorverse are primarily mentioned in the piece, with Humble again commenting on the company’s new-found philosophy established out of Second Life:
“At Linden Lab, we believe that creativity is within all people and that it empowers them like nothing else,” said Humble. “We make digital spaces where people can have fun while exploring and sharing their creativity with others. Millions of people around the world have enjoyed that in Second Life, and we look forward to inspiring even more creativity.”
Some people have already taken issue with the use of the past tense (“have enjoyed”) when used in reference to Second Life on the Lab’s corporate website, and they are liable to feel the same way seeing Humble use the same phrasing here. While I don’t necessarily support such views, I would say that when commenting on Second Life to the wider community, media or otherwise, use of the present tense might underline the fact that SL is still out there and people are enjoying it and what it has to offer. Hope you’re reading this, Rod! ;-).
The feature is light on details for both Dio (which gets a throwaway mention) and Versu (which gets no mention at all); whether this is down to the interviewer missing them, or Humble not being in a position to speak about them at the time of the interview, is unclear. However, what he does say in reference to all three which do get a mention (Patterns, Creatorverse and Dio) is that people will be able to monetize them.
Patterns: users to be able to monetize it in the future?
This is something he lightly touched upon in his interview with Giant Bomb, specifically with reference to Creatorverse, and I mused in passing on his comment and whether it would be applicable to all of LL’s new products. Well, it would seem so.
For those curious about Linden Research itself, the article contains some interesting elements:
Today, Second Life survives with 1 million monthly active users. The world generated $75 million in revenues last year and it is operating profitably. That has allowed Humble to expand his team to 175 employees and go after the markets beyond the virtual world.
There is also mention of the 2010 lay-offs, although these are again referred to slightly out-of-context, failing to mention that during his tenure, Mark Kingdon actually recruited some 125 people into LL, expanding it by as much as 50% in order to fuel (for the most part) the company’s failed (some would say misguided) attempt to enter the enterprise market. As such, while the lay-offs did hurt, at the time they actually returned the company to more-or-less the “pre-Kingdon” expansion, a move in line with the company also dropping all aspiratiosn of entering the enterprise applications market.
However (and ignoring the perjorative “survives” in the Gamesbeat comment), the reference to “expanding” the team to 175 is an eye-opener; it suggests that the continuing run of those departing the company / being asked to leave has been cutting somewhat deeper than may have previously been appreciated given that 200-220 employees has tended to be the considered figure for the number of people employed by the Lab.
Nor does the article ignore Second Life. In referring to SL, Humble tells Gamesbeat that it is also getting a major upgrade this year, and that Linden Lab is “still investing in 3D virtual worlds.” This is liable to lead to some speculation as to what the “major upgrade” may be. For my part, and given that this week sees some shuffling of regions onto new hardware together with the recent network optimisation tests, I’m thinking Humble is talking more in terms of the company’s much-touted hardware and infrastructure investment, rather than a mega new in-world feature.
Also quoted in the article, LL board member Will Wright makes mention to SL in a maner which may draw frowns from some:
Rod has a great sense of player communities and the forces that drive them. At Linden Labs [sic] I know he’s focused on trying to evolve a very established community into something much broader and more inviting.
While this probably refers to opening-out Second Life to Steam and potentially generating a wider appeal for the platform than is currently the case, that Wright refers to Humble trying to make the existing SL community “more inviting” might easily be taken the wrong way. Many within SL are already feeling increasingly alienated as a result of some of LL’s actions under Humble’s tenure as CEO; so the idea that some at board level are still of the opinion that the existing SL user community is somehow less-than-inviting isn’t going to do much to dispel these feelings or that there is perhaps something of an adversarial attitude within the Lab towards its existing users.
Issue might also be taken with Humble’s own closing statement in the interview, in which he says, in part:
“We are still investing in 3D virtual worlds,” he said. “But shared creative spaces is what we do. There is an opportunity to embrace the new way of developing things. A lot of this could be done inside Second Life. But you get more creativity in the hands of more people by building on new platforms”
This could be seen as something of a dismissal of Second Life; however, I’d hesitate in seeing it that way. The sentiment behind the comment could just as easily be born out of an acknowledgement that from a business perspective, 3D immersive environments are still a niche market and are liable to remain so for some time to come. Thus, it is actually easier for the company to rapidly grow a new user base (and revenue streams) and leverage new platforms through the development of new products. As such, when looking at Humble’s words from the persepctive of SL, perhaps the the key phrase to focus upon is, “We are still investing in 3D virtual worlds.”
It appears Linden Lab are keeping to their promise of “rapid iterations” for Patterns, as an update will be released on Thursday 18th October, two weeks after the initial Genesis Release launch.
The e-mail announcing the update reads in full:
Hello Patterns Customer,
Our first update is right around the corner. We’re going to be updating to a bigger world, adding more shapes to find in the world and – based on your feedback – we’re adding the ability to place formations on your own creations as well as ours. We’re also fixing plenty of bugs.
Our plan is to update on Thursday October 18 on Steam. We’ll keep you posted on our progress.
Thanks for all the great feedback and thanks again for being an early adopter of Patterns!
Patterns: expanding on Thursday 18th October
I’ll be looking forward to the update; things have been a trifle dull in Patterns land of late, as I’ve run out of shapes I can think of to build.
Hmmm… I feel a review update coming on as well – you have been warned! :).
Update, February 19th, 2014: Creatorverse was discontinued by Linden Lab on February 19th, 2014. Links to the Creatorverse website have therefore been removed from this article.
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 