Three Ring's Design Open Sources the Puzzle Pirates Toolkit

[schild]

Three Rings Releases Open Source Multi-player Game Toolkit and Launches Game Gardens Website

San Francisco, CA. -- March 17, 2005 -- Three Rings, developer of massively multi-player online games, today annouced the release under an open source license of their Narya toolkit for creating online multi-player games, the same toolkit used to create their flagship product, "Yohoho! Puzzle Pirates." Concurrent with this release, they launched the Game Gardens website at http://www.gamegardens.com/ where developers can collaborate on game design and development, and host, free of charge, games developed with the toolkit.

"The combination of the toolkit and the hosting site eliminates many of the hurdles a budding game developer faces when trying to turn an exciting new game idea into something people can actually play online," says Three Rings CTO Michael Bayne. "We're hoping to foster experimentation in game design and provide hobbyists and indy developers with a place to share ideas and evolve their designs with the help of an audience of their peers."

The Narya toolkit is developed in Java (tm) and works with the Windows, MacOS X and Linux operating systems and is available for download from http://www.gamegardens.com/

Three Rings is a San Francisco developer of online games. Three Rings' award winning flagship game, "Puzzle Pirates," is a massively multi-player world of puzzle games. More information on Three Rings can be found at http://threerings.net/ and "Puzzle Pirates" can be found at http://www.puzzlepirates.com/

I'd classify it as PR, but it's far too awesome to just be PR. If I didn't get bored so easily, I'd take a stab at creating my own card game or something.

[Megrim]

Hm, it would be really good if they accepted people's puzzle submission into their game. Would certainly help with the content problem.

 - meg

[MaceVanHoffen]

This kind of thing sets my not-so-inner geek free.  I've downloaded this and am digging into the API.  It's not terribly well documented, but its featureset is pretty rich.  I'm working on a port of an old Java version of Mahjong that I did a couple years back as a way of learning the framework.

[Samwise]

Hm, it would be really good if they accepted people's puzzle submission into their game. Would certainly help with the content problem.

That's sort of the plan, as far as I can tell.

A Spot of Gardening

The "Parlor Games" in the Inn now provide a link to a new experimental open source games site recently launched by Three Rings called Game Gardens. Feel free to check out the games made by people on that site and if you're of the programmin' persuasion, you can take a crack at making a game yourself.

It sounds like for now it just sends you to a website instead of integrating it fully with the game, but that might eventually change.

[Krakrok]

It might have been cool if I didn't detest Java so much. Currently playing with the Second Life XML-RPC interface.

[AOFanboi]

It's not terribly well documented

I was going to write something about that being a defining characteristic of open-source stuff. But then I remembered hunting futilly for docs for Oracle's APIs.

So, are someone working on a Star Wars version of Puzzle Pirates with this toolkit? Against SW:G, the only way is up.

[HaemishM]

Now that's just fucking money.  :-D

Even though I don't like puzzle games, I applaud these guys for constantly doing things most would never have the balls to do.

[Soukyan]

Great news! Thanks for the post and the link. Those guys at Three Rings continue to do things right... at least IMO.