Gaining Traction, I hope

So I finally feel as though I can take a break from Spore.  Or at least, play it 'casually.'  A few days ago I reached the Center of the Galaxy.  Today, I finally killed an Epic in the creature phase.  Took me twenty minutes or so once I actually set the fight up correctly.  Really didn't work out the way I had hoped, having allies come in and help in the fight.

I really like Spore's website, though.  Being able to view anyone's creation from your browser is really neat.  Here's my profile. 

And this is just neat:

I am quite proud of The Horrid.

To my surprise, I managed to find an Easter Egg in Spore.  At the main screen, if you spin the galaxy as fast as you can, pictures of people will fall out of the center of it.  I have yet to find out who these people are.

Moving right along, I was happy to find an email today from Metaplace, proclaiming my new status as a beta tester!  If you haven't heard, Metaplace is the baby of Raph Koster, and is essentially going to be a virtual multiverse of related infrastructure.  It is primarily for making virtual worlds, but the back-endedness of those worlds can carry over to other places.  Or you can license your code to other designers, and get a chunk of the change if they start making money off their game.  Just visit the site, that'll explain it much better than I can at the moment.  Just know that it's kind of a big deal.

So now I guess I'll be looking into learning LUA.  When Metaplace was first announced, there was a huge buzz about it and I quickly found myself helping a fledgling game called MetaPunk get organized.  We wanted to make a cyberpunk game that was really worthy of Shadowrun and Johnny Mnemonic and Neuromancer.  When I wasn't accepted as one of the early beta-testers, I decided that my efforts were better utilized elsewhere.  Now that I'm here, though, I was just in time to see MetaPunk go into stasis.  Until it gets more help, at least.    

Buzzkill, man.  Bad case of deja vu.

The Meaningful Play Conference is just around the corner.  I'm waiting to hear back to see if I can be an Associate and therefore not pay the conference fee, but at least I have a place to stay, now.  Courtesy of Spartasoft's current president, I have a lovely couch to crash on while we raid the conference for three days. 

I'd do my best to Liveblog from the event, but I need to get a new power cord for my laptop still.