Comments on: Nicktropolis Looks Like Ass

By: Ryan

Ryan — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 14:28:49 +0000

Er… that may be going a touch far.

By: izzy

izzy — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 00:21:58 +0000

wow nicktropolis is umm

By: Nicktropolis Fan

Nicktropolis Fan — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 22:06:42 +0000

ROT IN A SACK ROMERO!!!!

By: Ryan

Ryan — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 14:04:42 +0000

Dammit, Mom – THIS is why i stare at the wall and cry all day.

By: Ryan's Mom

Ryan's Mom — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 13:30:32 +0000

Look at the pot calling the kettle black. There should be a warning on the amount of ass allowed on screen. What with assy Nick screens being portrayed on such an asstacular website (love the shit brown colour BTW, really ties the post together) and playing such an ass-inine featured game on your homepage (dragon boretacular!) I can only conclude that you spend too much time with your opinion instead of say, working on being somewhat talented.

Love your mother.

(ps we’re having meatloaf tonight. Please come over, we didn’t mean it when we said you were a disappointment to us)

By: Ryan

Ryan — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 22:57:27 +0000

Being a fair-minded individual, i loaded up Nicktropolis in my Internatz browser to investigate your wild claims.

i chose a character, which looked like ass, and started in a room with an indoor tree, which also looked like ass. i walked inside the tree. (walking, naturally looked like ass). An assy-looking Loading screen greeted me.

It stayed on the loading screen. The whole day.

So you were right and i was wrong, in that i did not call Nicktropolis out for the true breadth and scope of its assiness. The whole thing is ass, from top to bottom. It’s like an ass totem pole. i stand corrected.

By: Peter

Peter — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 11:41:31 +0000

I disagree. The art looks really good. Nicktropolis game play is lacking but the art is solid. The rooms you are talking about are all from the beta launch. The more recent rooms are detailed and robust.

By: glenn

glenn — Sun, 17 Aug 2008 22:12:17 +0000

nick is like ass tropolis!!!!!hahahaha

By: Ryan

Ryan — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 14:44:46 +0000

The people have spoken!

By: katie

katie — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 14:42:08 +0000

your right it looks like ass

By: untoldentertainment.com » Blog Archive » Kids Eagerly Await Nickelodeon’s Next Shipment of Ass

Thu, 20 Mar 2008 15:29:51 +0000

[...] MMOs, according to Joystiq. Pursuant to my admittedly unprofessional rant a few weeks ago, Nicktropolis Looks Like Ass, i have to wonder whether the newest projects in development over there will follow sui, or if [...]

By: chris romero

chris romero — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 02:57:14 +0000

yah – Islands Untold is definitely the kind of game I’m talking about – you should get that out there if you can.
And yah galaxseeds is a nice look for sure, ever see the movie Fantastic Planet?
Helsinki is a good drinking town, but I wouldn’t want to get stuck there for a long dark winter, that’s for sure.
Let me know which conference you get to next and we can chat.
cheers!
Christopher

By: untoldentertainment.com » Blog Archive » Best of GDC 2008 - Best Panel or Lecture

Wed, 27 Feb 2008 02:53:03 +0000

[...] The Worlds in Motion’s chair, Leigh Alexander, was a self-aggrandazing egomaniac (it takes one to know one) who had to introduce herself before every session, although the room’s turnover rate was low. Despite this, if Leigh was the one responsible for booking the summit’s speakers, she did a great job (with some exceptions). [...]

By: Ryan

Ryan — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 00:24:23 +0000

i actually did wake up when you started talking SPOGs … i designed one before i heard you use that term. The game is called Islands Untold … it’s actually where i derived the name of my studio:

http://untoldentertainment.com/blog/2007/11/20/islands-untold-a-minimally-multiplayer-online-game/

The kids’ MMO i worked on was GalaXseeds, for Corus Entertainment (they own YTV, Canada’s Nickelodeon):

http://www.galaxseeds.com

i was also lead game designer on Skittlization, a kids’ world entirely sponsored by Mars/Effem Foods. The Skittlization campaign came to a close last December.

i do agree whole-heartedly with one thing you said in your lecture: namely, that text and graphic adventures, which older players are tired of, are ripe for a renaissance in the kids’ gaming world. Text/GAs were tops when i was younger, and in my early experiments making games for Corus Entertainment in Canada, the graphic adventure-like games enjoyed the most longevity and the keenest fanship.

i spoke to someone at GDC07 about VMK. Here’s what i remember him saying:

1. The audience is hard to expand beyond English-speaking kids who live close to the theme parks in Anaheim and Orlando.

2. Disney will probably wind the project down or spin it off into other properties in the near future.

3. Please oh God please get me out of Finland.

By: chris romero

chris romero — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 23:00:39 +0000

Well thanks Ryan, I appreciate the openness. I do agree that chatbots are super-limited, and in my opinion the implementations we’ve seen so far aren’t so great, but I think there is more to do here, and when you look at high profile titles like Mass Effect or WoW that use multiple choice (!) for NPC interaction, I guess a more open chat is always better. I did note in my talk that the game Façade as well as some of Rob Zubek’s work points the way towards more, and that parser-based games were an open topic of discussion at Project Horseshoe: http://www.projecthorseshoe.com/ph07/ph07r6.htm. One of the things you could do with chatbots is to have them basically host a parser-based game in their chat bubbles, no cleats required. Again, for kids 7-10 who are just learning how to type, there may be entertainment there that most adults would dismiss.
Hmmm, might have to guess you had something to do with VMK (which does look better than most), but not for me to say I guess.
As for concluding points, it seems to me that there is a big rush of people trying to put these platforms together, particularly in the kids space. As kids are going to be limited in what they say, and you’re not going to be able to support highly performance gaming, what are you going to put in there?
I think that Six Player Online Games (SPOGs) meaning games that offer play to 2-10 players more or less simultaneous is what we’ll start to see more of, and I think there is a bit of a paucity of games/activities in this area, my current company is interested in developing same.
I also illustrated an Abstract Design Tool, basically a game design graph that had a Y axis of symmetry to asymmetry, and an X axis of synchronous to asynchronous gaming. It’s just a thought tool, but leads to some interesting game design ideas.

cheers to you,
Christopher

By: Ryan

Ryan — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 22:05:41 +0000

Hi, Chris. While i’m not aiming to become a critical web pundit attack dog, i appreciate you dropping by to defend your work.

Saying that ChatBots test better with kids is like saying that getting kicked in the groin when you’re a kid hurts less, because your testicles haven’t descended yet. Regardless, canned chat, ChatBots and a soccer cleat to the babymaker are all incredibly unpleasant.

The kids’ MMO project that i was on also used a white label chat system. i don’t think it’s a coincidence that Club Penguin, which offers open chat to players (who lie about their age) is so much more widely reknowned than white label worlds, including Nicktropolis. (Club Penguin, in my opinion, is also a real visual fixer-upper.)

Apologies if i missed the concluding points in your presentation – feel free to reiterate them here. And kudos for your guts, both here and at GDC. ;)

- Ryan

By: chris romero

chris romero — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 21:50:58 +0000

hmmm, well, sorry that you were so disappointed sir. My hope with the talk was to outline the difficulties of trying to execute a project of this class in a large branded environment. Allow me to suggest that while Nictropolis does have issues, at least Nickelodeon is not at the point where it feels like it needs to spend $700 million dollars in order to compete with other large branded entertainment concerns. Our testing indicated that as I outlined chatbots work a lot better with kids than with adults, I don’t believe there was anything like true AI implied there. And geez, you didn’t even touch on the next steps, sorry to see that.
o well, I tried.
chris romero