The Game Developer's Guide to Pwning Second Life

wjamesau writes "How do you create a game in Second Life that earns you thousands of dollars and scores you development deals with outside publishers? One SL user did just that last year with a casual game called Tringo (sort of multiplayer Tetris with gambling). The game became so popular in Second Life that he sold the rights for a Web version, a GBA port from Crave, and coming up, a TV game show. While there's dozens of other games in Second Life, from FPS to RTS to a mini-MMORPG, none of them have come close to Tringo's success. Kotaku is running an article I've written, based on three years helping Linden Lab organize and run the annual Second Life game developer contest: a how-to guide for creating the next Tringo-big hit."

Comments

gambling

[WinEveryGame]

It appears that gambling is becoming a key component here in order for getting any real $$$ from selling this stuff..

poor engine for most games..

[crossmr]

The game is extremely poor for FPS and RTS type of games. Heck someone built tetris there and runs like ass.
I think you're better off producing quality elsewhere and shopping it around. A single success doesn't really set any kind of precedent.

Another guide to make millions off Second Life

[nEoN nOoDlE]

I have another guide to make a bunch of money off Second Life, but since I'm a nice guy, I'm just gonna tell you for free. The secret is - write a guide on how to make a successful Second Life game and watch the suckers pile up to hand you money.

Is there anything more pointless than making a guide on how to make lightning strike twice?

Yep. Follow the money...

[patio11]

Tringo's business model in SecondLife is that you buy a copy of the object and run it as a franchise, paying $60 upfront and some percentage of your rake from the machine. As an operator, you only make money by convincing people to play. The only way to convince them to pay for marginal playing opportunities is to give them a reward, i.e. money. And that implies gambling. Second Life is not a good environment for creating games which are actually fun -- if you wanted primarily fun games you'd be in WoW or Puzzle Pirates (whose puzzle games absolutely smoke the poor Tetris clones that infest Second Life).

Now, if I were really out to make a buck, I'd come up with some form of multi-level marketing for an object in SecondLife. Take anything with intrinsic value -- say, a hat. Now let anyone who has that hat spawn a new copy of the hat for less money than it takes to buy a hat from you (picking numbers out of thin air, $5 for a hat original and $3 for a hat copy). Then you essentially deputize folks to sell your hat to fashion-conscious folks AND folks desperate to make a virtual buck by hawking hats (LOOK! You only have to sell 3 hats to make your investment back!). Now, taking the idea one step farther, instead of actually selling the hat you should sell the *script* that makes the hat into a money machine. "Hiya, Mr. Content creator. Have I got a business proposition for you -- you take that new school girl uniform* and use my Money Machine script on it, and it will virally populate itself around the world. The script only costs $100 and $.50 a copy. You could make hundreds of dollars!"

* Yeah, somebody sells them. *shudder* There's two "killer apps" in Second Life, and one of them is not gambling.

I've made a few games in SL.... it's frustrating

[presearch]

I built one of the winning games in last year's SL contest, and several other moderately complex things as well.

The scripting language is interesting, fun, and somewhat well thought out. If you could use it to write someting that ran locally, you might be able to have something semi decent. but... After it goes thru the server system and out over the net intermixed with all that SL data using Linden Lab's lazy update protocol, you feel lucky to get things to work at all, ending up with everything a primitive compromise.

It's irritatingly flaky. The API calls are at best 80% reliable, terribly documented, and they come and go at the whim of Linden Labs with no standards a developer can rely on. Maybe object messages will work, maybe not. Maybe when a player shows up, all the parts will rez, maybe not. Maybe physics will work, usually not.

In 3 years, there's been no significant improvement in the graphics. It looks very dated, especially the avatars and what passes for a skybox. Everyone walks around like stiff zombies. It's still buggy as hell, especially if you have less than a 1MB line and a $4K PC. Get more than 10 people in the same place and it slows to a crawl for everyone. Can't complain though... Second Life zealots will tell you it's your fault because you don't have everything turned down to minimum settings.

The idea has potential, and Linden Lab has indeed solved some of the harder problems of implementing the Metaverse, but at this point, they just can't scale any further without it collapsing under it's own weight. Time to take what's been learned, pull the plug on Second Life, and build something with modern graphics, open standards, and distributed servers that anyone can run.

Although it's neat to move from sim to sim in the mainland , most "serious" players opt for a seperate island. That costs >$1200 startup and $200 a month.
I'd much rather be able to host my own sim, with a coordinated method of sharing comm channels, directory service, and inventory items with other hosts and players.

Again, so much potential, but at the rate they are going, it'll be dead in less than 2 years, a blip in computer history. I think the real goal of the game, and it *is* a game, is to pump up the number of user accounts, and squeeze in a couple thousand more users "in-world" to make it look attractive for some company to buy them up so Philip "Linden" and the verture guys can cash out.