Space Opera

"Space Opera" is an online role playing and storytelling game that I am developing in my spare time. The computer game developer community is increasingly following Hollywood's model of increasingly huge monolithic blockbusters. As a result, games offer hundreds of hours of playability, super amazing graphics and an incomprehensible user interface that takes an hour and a half to learn. Once learned, a player needs to either play alone or find folk to play with for a manic three hour session, but schedules become difficult to organize and just playing a game with your friends looses what's fun about it, communicating with your friends.

So how does "Space Opera" work? It's playable over the internet via just a Flash enabled browser, (so you can play with your Mac friends too). No ActiveX upgrade or 100 MB installation required. If successful, it will have a transparent user interface that is simple enough for any computer user to pick up without help.  One player starts the game and sends an email to his or her friends asking them to join the story.

Playing the story consists of navigating the universe and writing your own character's portion of the story with the writing tools and media elements that the game engine provides. Think of it as multimedia colorforms or mad-libs. Or if a MUD were implemented with a multimedia newsgroup instead of a chat interface. As a result of this model of playing, a gamer who works can spend 15 minutes in the morning before work writing their response to an element of the story and spend an hour and a half reading his or her friends postings in a later session the following week. There's no rush. Everyone stays in touch and creates their story together at their own pace.

Ah yes, and "Space Opera" will be free.

Here is a splash animation that demonstrates the general style of the piece.