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Blog | Massively Fun Saying Goodbye to Wordsquared Saying Goodbye to Wordsquared November 22nd, 2013 We’re very sad to announce that Word² will be shutting down as of December 1, 2013. When we first launched Word² as part of the Node Knockout programming competetion 3 years ago, we had no idea how far it would grow. It’s been an amazing experience playing with everyone, and we’re thankful we’ve had the opportunity to meet so many wordcrafters since then. You’ve truly inspired us with your creativity. The ability to purchase stars will be disabled today; the game itself will be unavailable starting 5pm PST on December 1. We’re working to make the game board dataset available for those who want to do cool things with it; we’re also hoping to make one last map of the entire world available. Keep an eye on this blog for more information. Our customer support page will remain active to ensure a smooth transition for all players. If you have questions or need additional help, please contact support@wordsquared.com for assistance. Below are a few highlights from Word². Nice job Wordcrafters! We couldn’t have done it without you. Share this: Twitter Facebook Google Pinterest Reddit blog comments powered by Disqus Fast Iron Preview – Massively Fun’s one-of-a-kind game for Leap Motion Fast Iron Preview – Massively Fun’s one-of-a-kind game for Leap Motion June 28th, 2013 Fast Iron is a game designed for use with the revolutionary Leap Motion Controller . It’s new, it’s fresh and, it’s something that has never been seen before. Most of all, it’s a lot of fun to play. We wanted to share some thoughts about our experience building this game and give a peak inside the fun. Make sure to get signed up for the Fast Iron beta at: beta.fastirongame.com and support Fast Iron’s social pages on Twitter and Facebook , before you go! Describing Fast Iron. Fast Iron is the first game of it’s kind. Yes, people have made spagehetti-western quick draw games before, but never like this. By using simple hand gestures and the Leap Motion Controller, players draw, aim, and shoot their guns in duels against gangs of various strengths and abilities. Players are cast as the Marshal in a western boomtown overrun by murderous outlaws. They must do battle to save the town. See a teaser here: Doing battle in Fast Iron . Is fast and dirty. A battle begins with fighting an outlaw in a gang network. You have to outwit and outshoot them to eventually make your way to the gang boss. All the while, your opponents skills are getting more complex as they become faster. The game sounds great ! Now tell me more about Leap Motion. Leap Motion is the latest and greatest way to improve your desktop experience. At Leap Motion, they believe users should be able to have an immediate interaction with their PC, without the use of any additional tools. The Controller senses your hand movement in front of the screen, allowing users to use only their gestural motions to control the game. Amazing. In July, Leap will begin offering games from within their own app-store, Airspace . How Leap Motion makes game play different than a traditional PC game . Leap allows for a higher level of game interaction than what we’ve ever seen with a traditional PC game. You feel as if you’re participating in the virtual envirnment. This kind of interaction is a completely unknown user interface paradigm. Designing for something without user expectation, or traditional schema, has been an interesting challenge. It’s been invigorating to help try to define how users will interact, while using an entirely new device. Thoughts on using Unity as our game engine. Fast Iron is our first game built on Unity . We were happily surprised by the amazing functionality provided, right out of the box. This meant going from zero to playable took far less time than expected, in spite of knowing very little about the software to start. Overall, we were very happy with our Unity experience and will use it again. Obstacles we encounterd making the game. See above. Starting from scratch with an unfamiliar game engine was our biggest challenge. While we were fortunate our studio’s art and design teams did have previous experience working in 3D environments, our enginering team did not. They were given the arduous task of quickly coming up to speed, all while working with new concepts, in order to meet our relitively short development cycle. Fast Iron was built in less than THREE months! We’re pretty proud of this accomplishment. The best thing about Fast Iron. At Massively Fun we love exploring new platforms. We’re honoured to have been invited into the Leap Motion developer beta. It’s been a blast working in this new space. What makes us the happiest about Fast Iron, is that the tools got out of the way, and allowed us to build something much more expressive than ever before. Something really special, and really fun. We were able to build our love letter to spaghetti-western’s in a much shorter timeframe than we’d expected. What’s next for Fast Iron . More. More gangs, more locales and deeper game play. We’ve got a lot of exciting things in store – we can’t wait to bring them to you. Stay tuned! Find Fast Iron Find Massively Fun McKenna Phillabaum is one of the many Massively Fun janitors. Share this: Twitter Facebook Google Pinterest Reddit blog comments powered by Disqus Seattle Game Dev JS: A look back and a step forward. Seattle Game Dev JS: A look back and a step forward. February 6th, 2013 This January, our HTML5 Game Dev Group turned one. (They grow up so fast!) And it’s with this milestone in mind, we’d like to say a heartfelt Thank You, to all of our members, sponsors and everyone who helped to make our meetings the awesome knowledge filled nuggets they are! This year looks to be even better than the last. We kicked it off with a power outage, followed by an amazing recovery and presentation (in spite of no power!) on HTML5 Optimizations , from the Double Down mobile team. Never a dull moment! Last year, our group went from 0 to 380 members, a huge achievement! The Game Dev JS crew is a diverse community full of developers, artists, gamers, program managers, network admins and JS enthusiasts of all kinds. Our youngest developer member is just 13 years old! By always keeping the content fresh, the speakers lively and the members engaged, we’ve been able to build a robust community – we couldn’t have done it without you! If you’re interested in JS, meetup is a great chance to have some fun, learn something new, share something you know and meet some very interesting characters. Here’s some fun new member growth data from last year: And just in case you need more proof, here’s some of what we covered in 2012: Javascript Game Development: an Overview – Grant Goodale , Massively Fun Retained Mode Graphics Libraries – Kevin Moore , Pixel Lab Stupid Canvas Tricks – Dean Hudson , Massively Fun HTML5 port of Zepto

P.S. A few readers have asked which books & hardware we actually reach for — it's Amazon: Game Dev Books & Gear; take a look here if you want the current details.