Serious Game To Build Sustainable Villages - Update

Via: Village: Play the world of social enterprise

Following my previous post dated September 4th, when the game wasn’t even out of the conceptual stage, Darian Hickman, the founder, reports Village Demo as making a good progress.

Below you may find a few extracts from his yesterday's posting on the demo status, although I won't be able to quote his high level of energy and enthusiasm:

"We're a few weeks away from showing the demo to our early supporters and to playtesters. Development has come along way, artwork has gone through several iterations of improvement, pathfinding code for our nonplayer characters is going through another revision.

The first set of tiles for the map are 90% done.Even with the progress on the demo though, the biggest advances lately have been connecting with social entrepreneurs at Stanford's Digital Vision Program.

Entrepreneurs from all over the world have come to Stanford to scale their projects to the next level. You'll see several serious games in the works to promote social benefits. Things are looking promising for collaboration with Village.

Also I recently presented Village to the Stanford ACM and it was very well received. The audience asked a lot of great questions and we got some solid interest from the CS students on the project now.

The big paradigm shift I had of late was the kind of game we're making. Village can start off well as a single-player casual download. Bryan Wiegele of BigTimeGames.com and Angel Inokon of Playfirst.com helped me realize there's a place for this game in the casual download market which is HUGE because that means we don't have to wait for multiplayer network infrastructure before getting to market. Bryan is refactoring all the docs and spreadsheets I've written up for the demo and is expanding them to a comprehensive design doc for the casual download release of Village."