MadPea: shifting the emphasis towards games like Blood Letters, The Collection and Buried
There come certain points in life when we have to do a little re-evaluation of who we are and where we are going. After some discussions within the team, we came to the conclusion that we are stopping the UNIA development on THIS platform.
These are the opening words from a heartfelt post from Kiana Writer, founder and Queen Pea of the prolific MadPea Productions.
Entitled MadPea Changes its Strategy, the post, which appears on the MadPea Productions website, rather than their wordPress blog, announces a change in direction for the team in light of the sheer hard work, blood, sweat and tears they collectively invested in UNIA, as they continue to develop immersive games for Second Life.
UNIA lis an incredible achievement, and will remain active in SL: but it is unlikely to see further significant development as the MadPea team refocus
As Kiana notes, UNIA was a massive undertaking for all concerned, which came a no small cost, some US $12,000 to put together and over two years to develop. Plus, as Kiana states:
During the development for UNIA we lost our sponsor and exactly 19 people from the huge team, including our lead developer for MadPea of several years,” Kiana explains. “Still we struggled with a smaller team and big expenses to bring it out because our vision had not changed: We needed to show what was possible to do on this platform.
Given this, and while UNIA continues to gain new players on a weekly basis and continues to excite and enthral, it’s really hard to justify such an enormous effort on an ongoing basis, and Kiana goes on to indicate in her post:
With our current resources we could do either one of the two things: Continue developing the UNIA saga or put our focus on smaller adventures such as BURIED and The Collection. Making smaller adventures takes us around 2 months while UNIA 2 would be at least 6 more months of waiting.
So it is that going forward, MadPea will be focused on “smaller” games (I use the quotes as such is the all-encompassing, grid-wide nature of many of their games, nothing MadPea does is ever really “small”), which can be developed over shorter times scales. In particular, such games will allow MadPea to better collaborate with and help promote businesses and content creators in Second Life, just as The Collection is right now, and both BURIED and Blood Letters.
In 2014, Blood Letters allowed us all to don fedoras and rain coats and adopt the roles of a PI (or is that PEA-I?) on the trail of a murderer
In this regard, Kiana indicates that the rest of 2015 is already mapped out by the team. The Collection (which I recently looked at here), will run through until the end of September, prior to making way for a new game starting in October and in time for Halloween (dare I mention…. Peatonville?).
To me, the decision from the team makes absolute sense. While UNIA was and is undoubtedly a magnificent achievement, Second life at times doesn’t really lend itself to projects of that scale or depth. However, games like The Collection, BURIED and Blood Letters not only allow MadPea to achieve their goal of collaborating with others more readily, they also enable the team to experience a greater degree of satisfaction in seeing their creations come to life and be enjoyed by others.
The Collection is available now for all those wishing to solve a mystery with a decidedly musical bent
My only question to Kiana is, why the emphasis on UNIA’s development ceasing on “THIS platform” (i.e. Second Life)? Is there yet more news to be a-coming? :D.
News is spreading of the sudden passing of Lumiere Noir, the man behind the Ivory Tower of Primitives, who died suddenly on Monday, August 10th, 2015.
Famous for his “Black Spy” avatar, Lumiere joined Second Life at the end of 2003, and originally built the Ivory Tower of Primitives on Noya. Later during 2004, a branch of the Tower was established on Natoma, functioning alongside the original until that was demolished in 2006.
A self-guided, self-paced tutorial and library to in-world building in Second Life, the Ivory Tower has been – and remains – an essential reference centre to all who treasure the art of in-world content creation.
By founding it, Lumiere extended his physical world abilities as a teacher into virtual spaces to great effect and the benefit of others. In Second life he was known as an open friend, excellent mentor, and for his sense of fun the good-natured mischievous twinkle in his eye.
As per the notices placed out around the Tower, objects of condolence from those who knew him should be passed to Avi Arrow, who will place them out.
To Tosha Tyan, his partner in Second Life, and to his family and friends in the physical world I offer my condolences at this time. Lumiere’s presence and influence will be sadly missed right across Second life by all who knew him, or came into contact with him.
Caledonia Skytower, Shandon Loring (centre) and Kayden Oconnell of Seanchai library perform A Christmas Carol as a part of the Library’s The Dickens Project, presented to both virtual and physical world audiences, in this evocative shot by Bear Silvershade
As regular readers here know, I keenly support the work of Seanchai Library through these pages, with regular updates on their weekly activities, coverage of their feature events and so on. Sadly, the UK / USA time difference means I’m rarely in a position to attend Seanchai readings, or schedule clashes keep me away, but those I have attended (The Dickens Project, War of the Worlds, Boofest, Bard on the Beach, etc.), have always been thoroughly enjoyable, and I recommend them to anyone who enjoys a well-told story.
Seanchai Library is one of the oldest spoken word venues in Second Life, as noted above, they run a wide range of events, some of which – such as their fabulous Explore the Great Gatsby have allowed them to spread their wings into other grids with great effect; it has also – as with The Dickens Project – offered them rich opportunities for physical and virtual world cross-overs.
a part of Seanchai Library’s immersive sets for Explore the Great Gatsby, in Kitely during early 2015
Now active on Second Life, Kitely and InWorldz, the Seanchai Library team are constantly looking for ways and means to improve upon its service to the metaverse. As such, they are seeking feedback on their programmes, and how people stay abreast of all that is happening with Seanchai, together with their interest in spoken word events in general.
So, if you do support Seanchai Library, be it in Second Life, Kitely or InWorldz, please do help them out and pay a visit to their on-line survey. It only takes a few minutes to complete, and your feedback would be greatly appreciated.
For those deeply entrenched in Second Life, his name may well pass unnoticed. However, since 2007, Justin has been deeply involved in OpenSimulator, as both a core developers and as a founding member and first president of the Overte Foundation, a non-profit organisation that manages contribution agreements for the OpenSimulator project.
Just how big a role he has played can in part be seen through the 11,631 code commits he has personally made to the project over eight years – that averages out to just under four commits every single day.
Justin announced his decision to step back from what has been a central role within the OpenSimulator in a blog post, where he emphasised that he’s doing so in part because he’s shifting career, although he makes it clear he is not leaving OpenSimulator entirely; it just won’t be a primary focus in his life in the foreseeable future:
OpenSimulator (and the Metaverse in general) has been an amazing journey but, as they say, we have grown apart. For whatever reason the area doesn’t fascinate me as it did. For better or for worse, that’s crucial for me to feel happy in my work.
I’m not disappearing completely but very likely for the immediate future my involvement will be at a low ebb (mainly answering mailing list questions and the occasional bug fix). My new field is quite a bit different (data warehousing for genetics and synthetic biology) but I will always have a soft spot for virtual worlds and the idea of the Metaverse.
Justin Clark-Casey’s code commits to OpenSimulator amount to 11,631 over eight years, work that has involved him in laying many of the foundations for the project and in re-factoring much of the code-base in 2011/12 (source: Black Duck Open Hub open source project tracker, via Hypergrid Business)
As well as his own code contributions, Clark-Casey has been noted for carrying out a significant portion of the work required integrate patches submitted by others, and has also taken on many of the organisational duties and activities which have perhaps been seen as somewhat onerous by other developers.
His popularity and import to the OpenSimulator community can be measures by the outpouring of personal thanks and testimonials which followed his own blog post and featured in Maria’s Hypergrid Business article.
According to Maria, Justin’s announcement has led to some concerns as to the future of the project. While there has never been a single de facto leader for the platform and its very diverse and global community, Clark-Casey has very much been the public face of the platform, hence some of the concerns raised.
However, as others central to the platform’s development have been quick to point out, this is not the first time a key figure has opted to set back from the platform. As it is, the team of core developers has changed over the years and remains strong. Similarly, OpenSimulator itself enjoys broad-based support and engagement from individuals, groups, education and academia and business. As such, there is little need to doubt its foreseeable future.
“Open source development has a high churn of people, for many reasons, and many times people who have been there for a long time simply decide to leave and do something else,” Crista Lopes, creator of the Hypergrid, told is quoted as saying in Hypergrid Business. “The good thing about open source projects is that, if people find them useful or interesting, the projects survive any one particular developer’s absence. That will happen with OpenSim too.”
I only had cause to talk to Justin twice over the years, and was certainly not in any way acquainted with him. However, as a very occasional OpenSimulator visitor (notably via Kitely, OSGid and InWorldz), I offer my own thanks to him for all of his contributions to the OpenSim community, and best wishes as he enters a new stage in his career.
There has been another recent spate of articles on Linden Lab, Project Sansar, Second Life and the potential for avatar-based virtual spaces with the upcoming advent of VR. Even Moviepilot, whom I took to task in 2014, has been busy looking at what’s going on, while Gamasutra rushed out what is essentially a nutshell version of Eric Johnson’s excellent Re/code article examining the question of the metaverse, which I looked at here.
However, the pick of the latest crop has to be Alice Truong’s article published in Quartz: Could the Oculus Rift help give Second Life a second life?While the title might sound Second-Life centric and suggestive of a piece looking at how it will faire under the Rift (“not very well”), it is anything but.
What is actually presented is a well-rounded piece on the future of avatar-based virtual spaces which uses Second Life as the measure of their mark and launchpad for their future. Within it, Second Life is examined from a number of angles and Sansar is explored, together with a nodding look towards High Fidelity.
Alice Truong: thought on virtual spaces and avatars in Quartz (image credit: Quartz.com)
As with most of the pieces which had appeared over the last month or so, little real news on Sansar (or SL’s development for that matter) is given out. This is hardly surprising, as the Lab does like to hold its cards close to its chest – the relative newness (and thus the difficulty in highlighting specific tablets-of-stone facts) of Sansar notwithstanding.
What makes this article a joy, is that it provides a solid framing for the subject of the Lab and virtual worlds, reaching back to 1999 and the original efforts with The Rig. This is nicely packaged and offers a solid foundation from which Ms. Truong expertly weave her piece. Some of the path she takes will be familiar, particularly where SL and Sansar is concerned. We get to hear about SL’s growth, revenue, the US $60 million collectively cashed-out of the platform by many of its users, etc.
We also get fair mention of the decline in the number of active users on the platform, but again, this is properly framed. At its peak, SL had around 1.1 million active users; eight-ish years later, that number stands at around 900,000. A decline, yes. but as Ebbe Altberg points out hardly any kind of “mass exodus”; and certainly nowhere near the dire haemorrhaging of users we tend to hear proclaimed to be happening every time the Lab makes what is perceived as an irksome decision.
For Sansar, similarly familiar ground is covered – the revenue model (and the comparison with SL’s model and its weakness), the promise of VR, the opportunity to grow a platform for “tens, if not hundreds” of millions of users, the aspect of much broader “discoverabiilty” / ease of access for Sansar in order to help generate more appeal, and so on.
Mention is made of the Lab planning to “commercially release” Sansar by the end of 2016. Given what has been said by the Lab to date concerning time frames for future work, and allowing for Ebbe’s comments of perhaps having something worthy of a “version 1.0” label by the close of 2016, I’m taking the comment to be more of a misunderstanding on Ms. Truong’s part than any revelation as to Sansar’s roadmap.
Hunter Walk (l), the Lab’s former “Director of Everything Non-Engineering” as well as a founder of the company, and now a VC in his own right, and Bernard Drax, aka Draxtor Despres (r) offer thoughts on Sansar
Another enjoyable element of this article is that Ms. Truong casts her net wide for input; thus she captures both Hunter Walk and Draxtor Despres. Their comments serve to both offer the means by which ideas can be further explored in the piece, and serve to offer a measure of counterpoint to the assumed mass appeal spaces like Sansar and High Fidelity will have.
Hunter Walk, for example, underlines the most critical problem in growing users Second Life has faced throughout its lifetime – that of accessibility and use. As he states, “ultimately, the work you had to put in was, for most people, more than the fun you got out.” Not only does this underline the essential truth about SL’s longest-running issue (it’s as true today for many as 2003/4), it lays the foundation for an exploration of some of Sansar’s fundamental differences to SL later in the article.
Hunter also passes comment on the idea of these spaces finding many millions of users, pointing out that “tens of millions” was always an unrealised dream at the Lab for Second Life; perhaps a cautionary warning about focusing on user numbers. He also seems to offer something of a warning on investment returns in such ventures as well, again referencing Second Life, although if intended as a warning, it is more relevant to High Fidelity (which has received around US $16.5 million in investment to date).
Draxtor similarly questions whether user numbers should necessarily be the focus / rationale for building these kind of virtual spaces. Like him, I’m far from convinced Sansar will have the kind of broad-ranging reach to draw in “hundreds of millions” (or, if I’m honest, even more than the low tens of millions). I’ve explained some of the reason why I think in my review of Eric Johnson’s piece linked to towards the top of this article, so I won’t repeat them here.
Could the promise of 2mixed reality” technologies which combine VR, AR and physical world activities yet serve to keep avatar-based virtual spaces a niche endeavour? (image: Magic Leap, via the New York Times)
If I’m honest, my only regret is that while Ms Truong’s tone is (rightly) sceptical in places, there is no outright challenge to the idea that people will embrace avatar-based interactions on a massive scale just because VR is on our doorstep.
Right now, there is a lot going on in the world of technology: VR, AR, the potential to fuse the two; faster communications capabilities, much better mobile connectivity, and so on. All of these could serve to dramatically marginalise any need to persistently engage in avatar-based interactions outside of very defined areas. As such, the inescapable whiff of “will we build it, they will use it” (to utterly mangle an already oft-misquoted line from a certain film) which seems to pervade the talk of high Fidelity and Sansar does perhaps deserve a degree of challenge.
Perhaps I should drop a line to Peter Gray suggesting an interview on those lines…
Nick Ochoa and Ebbe Altberg talk Sansar, SL and virtual spaces (image courtesy of UploadVR)
On August 3rd, Upload VR posted a video chat to YouTube which features a cosy fireside chat between Nick Ochoa and Linden Lab CEO Ebbe Altberg, which examines Sansar and virtual environments – touching on Second Life in some places.
The 30-minute conversation is very relaxed and approachable; Ebbe is clearly at ease (possibly helped by the glass of red wine!) and Nick is a very competent host in his ability to keep a conversational flow going. The camera is a tad wobbly in places, suggesting whoever was holding it may have been enjoying a sip or six of the wine / beer (!), but not excessively so. A lot of ground is covered in the time, and while it may be frustrating that some items are passed on rather than followed-up, keep in mind that this is more a conversation than in-depth interview / QA, serving to offer a non-SL audience a flavour of what that Lab is up to.
In terms of Sansar, we do get to learn that times are running very slightly behind schedule, in that we’re still a “couple of weeks” away from the start of initial closed alpha testing under NDA, but everything else remains pretty much as stated: NDA Alpha ramp-up through 2015 into 2016 and a more public beta in 2016.
We do get to learn a little more about how the closed alpha will run: those invited to join will be able to install and application with hooks into Maya, the tool of choice for initial testing. They build their “scenes” (“experiences”) in Maya and push a button in the application to “publish” the results on Sansar and obtain links they can share with others involved in the testing. Given Ebbe’s previous comments about “optimising” content for delivery across Sansar, I wonder if this approach will be how things are handled when Sansar is broadened to encompass other external content creation tools.
Beyond this, we get more on the Sansar / WordPress.com analogy, which first came to the fore in an article published by Variety online. This whole aspect of Sansar is a fascinating point of speculation to me, in that it suggests the platform is conceptually analogous to the concept of a Platform as a Service (PaaS), something which I think stands to make Sansar potentially far more powerful and flexible than people perhaps credit. However, as this is only speculation on my part, I’ll leave that to one side for now – but promise I will explore it further in a future article.
Within the UploadVR discussion, Ebbe’s focus on the WordPress.com analogy is tightly focused on the aspect of “discoverability”. The idea that right now and with SL, people have to join the platform in order to discover the experience, whereas Sansar should be more like WordPress – where people discover the blogs and don’t necessarily care about the platform on which the blogs are run.
A clearly relaxed Ebbe gets into talking avatar dancing (image courtesy of UploadVR)
Sansar’s revenue model gets a little more clarification, with the “sales tax” aspect clearly being applied to the platform’s GDP as a whole – which is Second Life’s case is an estimated half billion US dollars a year. Previously, there had been some confusion as to precisely where the “sale tax” might fall, particularly following an article in Xconomy.com, so the further clarification is welcome.
A direct parallel is drawn to on-line retail sites where up to 30% might be charged in commission. However, I wouldn’t take this to mean that’s necessarily what the Lab is looking to charge; Ebbe is making comparisons, not stating policy.
A more meaningful question to ask here is to how rapidly can Sansar realistically grow in user numbers order for such a model to be able to push the platform into the black? Unless there is some immediate and large influx of users, it could take a while for the Sansar economy to really get rolling; so conceivably, and depending on the associated overheads in providing the platform, the Lab could be operating Sansar as something of a loss leader for a time after it is “launched” to the world at large.
From here, the conversation broadens out to discuss the virtual opportunities that already exist in Second Life, from content creation through activities to monetization for users, to an overview of the many different communities present in-world, all of which almost seamlessly blends into more of a general chat on the potential and perils of VR which in turn bounces across health, the work of Jeremy Bailenson at Stanford University, and more besides. This actually makes for the interview’s most entertaining 10 minutes, as Ochoa and Altberg, obviously at ease, forget the presence of the camera as they chat.
Overall, this is a comfortable and pleasing discussion – not revelatory or packed with news, but one which is nevertheless interesting and within its own personal richness – not the least is the rapport which is clearly present between Altberg and Ochoa.
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 