Inside Social Games

Sharendipity is a new platform for building social games. While the company has been around for over a year, the Sharendipity platform (still in alpha) is one of the first robust tools we’ve seen that simplifies and modularizes the social game design experience. We sat down with Greg Tracy, one of the creators of Sharendipity, to learn more about it.

Sharendipity is uniquely extensible. Individuals can leverage or contribute to a growing library of modular content such as game characters, behaviors, special effects, artwork and sounds – which piece together in new and surprising ways. Anything made in Sharendipity can be shared back to the community either in whole or as smaller, reusable components. When those creations have value, Sharendipity provides a secure, integrated marketplace for buyers and sellers to transact.

Is it still possible to get in “under the hood” and make changes using code?

So it’s a lot like design programs like Dreamweaver: easy to learn, difficult to master?

How forgiving is the Sharendipity design experience? Even if it is a GUI interface, how much does syntax, event ordering, and so on come in to play?

Issues involving syntax are eliminated. However, if a user is trying to create brand new logic, there will still be a need to understand some basic programming concepts. Hopefully that user will be able to find the logic in the community and re-use it just like any other action in the system.

We’re also creating tools that allow component authors to define integration points. Sort of like a user defined wizard for every modular element in the community. Rather than having to worry about the “how” (such as order) of hooking things together, you’ll simply be instructed to provide the “what”. For instance, if you were to integrate a scoreboard into your game, the scoreboard author will provide an integration point that allows you to specify where the score value is being stored or may provide the user with an action to use when they wish to update the score. The author of the component can determine these integration points themselves.

How do art integration and animations work?

Every core object in the system has an image property associated with it. That means you can simply drag and drop any image onto an object. Actions can also be used to dynamically change an object’s image as well, or to step through frames in an animated GIF.

Since there are tools to help the programmatically challenged, do any exist for the artistically impaired?

Another great “oh, cool!” moment occurred when we created a painting application within Sharendipity called Painterdipity. It is a very primitive paint program built entirely from the platform’s core features. An interesting concept is that in the future the community might evolve this application into a more sophisticated paint program. Perhaps with special tools for the “artistically impaired”!

A designer tool for mainstream games called “Unreal Kismet” provides a visual GUI for designers that allows them to use Unreal Script without having to write lines and lines of code for level events. Essentially, they write small events, and connect them together almost like Microsoft Visio. How does this compare to Sharendipity?

We’re different in a few ways. Most importantly, the end goal of Kismet is still to produce code. They’re just trying to make it easier to visualize the logic. We want to provide total abstraction, and completely eliminate the need for producing code. In fact, when a user is creating a behavior for their evil enemy character, we never produce any code. That’s why users can instantly see, test, and tweak their logic in a live environment. There is no compilation step using Sharendipity!

For all intensive purposes, Sharendipity is one of the first “game engines” I’ve seen for social games on Facebook. Being a first of its kind, do you see it as becoming the Unreal Engine of its genre?