Comment UltraCorps &c (Score 1) 62
In fact, we're quite interested in videogames . . . I personally would love to be involved in the design side. And there's been a lot of negotiation over the years, mostly over GURPS, Car Wars, and Munchkin, but few deals have been made and none have survived to the ship date. If anyone reading this is involved with content acquisition for a competent and honest videogame publisher, feel free to make my day.
Which means that eventually we might try to enter the field on our own, or by contracting with a developer. UltraCorps is a learning project, aimed in that direction. We acquired it from the original developer, Jaleco (nee VR-1), not from Microsoft. We have indeed done quite a bit with it, starting with a complete code reimplementation in perl so it would run under Unix rather than the Microsoft OS that the Zone used. Granted, we thought we'd be DONE with it by now, and we're not. But it is in open beta at www.ultracorps.com, runs much more smoothly than it used to, and has a lot of new features. Feel free to drop in; you can now set up solo learning games and initiate private games for up to six players, and we start a massive game every month or so. (But if you hated UC before, you'll still hate it, because it's still a browser-based 4X that's all about strategy, resource management, and negotiation, and nothing about fancy graphics.)
It would have gone faster if our coder (note the singular) had had nothing else to do . . . In fact, I would be happy to hear from competent perl coders interested in part-time contracting to help us finish it. I'm best reached at sj@sjgames.com.
Which means that eventually we might try to enter the field on our own, or by contracting with a developer. UltraCorps is a learning project, aimed in that direction. We acquired it from the original developer, Jaleco (nee VR-1), not from Microsoft. We have indeed done quite a bit with it, starting with a complete code reimplementation in perl so it would run under Unix rather than the Microsoft OS that the Zone used. Granted, we thought we'd be DONE with it by now, and we're not. But it is in open beta at www.ultracorps.com, runs much more smoothly than it used to, and has a lot of new features. Feel free to drop in; you can now set up solo learning games and initiate private games for up to six players, and we start a massive game every month or so. (But if you hated UC before, you'll still hate it, because it's still a browser-based 4X that's all about strategy, resource management, and negotiation, and nothing about fancy graphics.)
It would have gone faster if our coder (note the singular) had had nothing else to do . . . In fact, I would be happy to hear from competent perl coders interested in part-time contracting to help us finish it. I'm best reached at sj@sjgames.com.
