Whirled Beta
After getting a friend request from a complete stranger (MySpace style), I logged into Whirled last night–only to find out that it’s no longer in super-top-secret alpha any more (confirmed at Daniel James’ blog). I have pretty favorable feelings towards Three Rings in general. I love Puzzle Pirates, and I love the idea of Bang! Howdy–that’s exactly the sort of game I used to play when I had endless free time.
There’s also Game Gardens. A year or so after I got to Georgia Tech’s program, I’d run across GG while looking for ways to do multiplayer java games (I was using Processing at the time for most of my stuff). I jumped on board, made a couple of experiments, and won 4th place in the contest they were running in the fall of 2006. I guess due to the fact that I was active on GG, I got one of the earliest invites. The fact that the thing ran in Flash was the only thing that got me to give the Flex SDK a shot, so in some ways I wouldn’t even be doing what I’m doing now if not for OOO. I was immediately in love with the idea–”a way to make money off of games? and do multiplayer? sweeeet!” (ahh, naiveté).
The slow growth (it was a REALLY limited alpha for awhile) aside, I made a few fun little game prototypes (learning AS3 at the same time I was learning their SDK). Ultimately, I gave up on developing games for Whirled–the SDK was evolving too rapidly, and I grew tired of trying to recode everything each time the SDK was updated. I’d like to think at least some of the results of my tinkering have made it into the beta, though. One of the first things I did was build a simple “comment wall” application (a la facebook/myspace) hooked into a database on my server. Not too long after, “toys” started showing up with similar capabilities. They could’ve been on the plan all along, but maybe I helped speed them along a bit. I also suggested a Bingo game at one point that people could play without leaving the Whirled, which seems to have made it in. Now that the Beta’s out, I’ll have to give the SDK another looks when my schedule lightens up a bit. Even though I lost patience with it, I never stopped liking the idea of it.
The problem with Whirled, as I see it, is that it’s far too idealistic for its own good. Their engineers are top-notch, and their games SDK is pretty impressive (as far as how much you can do). It’s also very specific to their application. I’m sure they’ll streamline the high scores and trophy awarding systems to be more like Kongregate’s at some point, but high scores and trophies just scratch the surface of what you can do with with Whirled (see some of their in-house games for examples). That power, I fear, will be its downfall. To really make the most of it, you’ve got to really develop FOR Whirled, and not just adapt what already exists–and that means the reward for doing so has to be on par for just developing for the web at large.
The beta only has the attention currency in place, so there’s not actually any way to make money off of it yet. My experiences with other portals have shown that there is plenty of money to be made doing flash games (not that that’s the only reason we make games), so at this point developing for Whirled gets back to the ideological coolness of it. There’s already a precedent for premium flash games (Kongregate offers $25k+ based on the strength of game pitches), so we’ll see if OOO follows suit in subsidizing development for their platform. If not, Microsoft’s XNA Community Games looks like it might be the winner for “premium games.” At the very least, I expect to see some contests like the Garage Games contests to funnel a few cool games into the Whirled.
I’m keeping my fingers crossed that this thing takes off, because I’d love to develop games for it (and profit!).
