Re: Business models and eye candy

["Mike Rozak" <Mike@mxac.com.au>]

Brandon J. Van Every wrote:

> Ok, I think I'm personally ready to skip past the opinionating about ART 
> and all of that.  I'm more interested in what it would take to actually 
> sell iDrama, in some form, to some people.  As a game developer I have a 
> bias that eye candy is needed to do this.

I am working on an interactive fiction (and virtual world) toolset that 
tries to be part way in-between text IF/MUDs and $5M-$30M adventure games 
and MMORPGs. (It'll also work for interactive storytelling, as well as 
single-player adventure games and online virtual worlds.) I'm trying to make 
it easy enough for a single multi-skilled author to create a title, or a 
small group of specialists.

It uses still, 360 surround images like Myst III. The images are rendered 
using my renderer in http://www.mxac.com.au/m3d. Add to this text-to-speech 
to avoid displaying text, audio, etc. (It can also play voice audio 
recordings if you don't like TTS.) It's completely controlled by a 
Java/Flash-like scripting language.

The system has very little in the way of animation, because adding animation 
puts the author onto a slippery slope that turns a single-person project 
into a multi-million dollar behemoth, especially for a multiplayer virtual 
world.

Mike Rozak
http://www.mxac.com.au