June 21, 2005: Game Gardens

Game Gardens is an experiment in online game development. Basically, you can log into their site and use the professional tools created by Three Rings to create your own Java/Flash games!

In their own words:

"Though Java and Flash have done a great deal to enable the development of simple single player games, multiplayer games tend to require an always-operating server, at least for match-making and frequently for running the server-side of a game. While there are free web hosting sites, there are no free game hosting sites (that we know of).

"Making any multiplayer game requires a bunch of work that has little or nothing to do with the game design but stands in the way of someone getting their idea turned into code. Being firm believers in (and users of) open source, we realized that the toolkit we'd written . . . is exactly the sort of thing that makes a perfect open source project . . .

. . . At a time when everyone in the industry is lamenting a lack of originality and wishing developers and publishers would take more risks, we are hoping to plant the seeds (pardon the pun) of innovation in this small way and do what we can to smooth the path for new game ideas to be born and grow."

So. Is that cool, or what? The site includes access to tools and a discussion forum. And even if you're not (yet) interested in creating your own games, you can see and play the games that others have already created.
-- Steve Jackson

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