Like a delicious pie long-a-baking, Whirled emerged from the alpha oven this week into flavorful open beta. You can play!
We’ve been in closed invite-only alpha for just over a year, since we announced Whirled at GDC 2007, with a pretty small community of very dedicated and creative players. It’s exciting to see her with 200 simultaneous players. Send me a friend request!
You need Flash 9.0.115 and FF 2/3, IE 7/8 or Safari. Whirled is very Javascript (GWT) and Flash intensive, as Cory discovered. It helps to have Firefox 3 beta 4, which has faster javascript and has fixed problems we were having with Flash ‘starving out’ GWT.
We made most of the games, but only a small part of the other stuff (~600 avatars, ~2,500 pieces of furniture, ~60 pets, etc.) available in the Shop. More about making stuff and a whole bunch of code can be found in the Whirled wiki. The market is fairly robust, for example Starry Night by Pareia and Sassy Skelly by Moppy, each with 200+ sales so far. We have only implemented Coins, the ‘soft’ or ‘attention’ currency, and they are pretty easy to come by playing games.
From the selection of Games: LolCaptions (LOLcats / silent movie captions to flickr photos), Brawler Whirled; (‘A side scrolling crawl-n-brawl game involving swords, gnolls, and cuteness’) by Ian of Mac Hall / Three Panel Soul, Boomie Time (by player The Cosmic Cheese, no graphics, yet), and Bella Bingo (an experimental in-Whirled game).
We had a plan to go beta in September 2007 with a Facebook app. We had it all working, but with the notable support of our new (as of June 2007) investor Jon Callaghan of True Ventures, we decided to delay and go back to work on UI and polish our selection of multi-player games. I’m glad we did. For the curious, we are not worrying about apps right now, yet verily, you can embed Whirled easily enough in ur myspace. Forsooth, tis old school.
Props to Sadiekate, SilentKnight, with first room embed, Matt, first to post in my reader, and Allakhazam who get first post!1!!
Merry Spring Equinox! All is well, and I hope with you. More soon!
Congratulations!