Closing in on Phase 1 End-O-Development

Since this year winter's GDC and Peter Smith's presentation at IMGDC, the Lunar Quest team has been hard at work finalizing the Beta release of Lunar Quest on the Multiverse platform. In order to reach our research and testing deadline and at the suggestion of our Game Designer, Tim Holt, we have adopted the Scrum structure of rapid, iterative development. As a new Scrum Master, I find the process to be helpful and hopefully it will be successful! I'll have to report back and let everyone know if we delivered on time.

Our world is coming together quite nicely and in the relatively-near future we will publish some screen shots of our Phase 1 lunar world. In the meantime, our 3D Modeler/Animator Brent Hermanski rendered out a variety of female player characters that are no joke; check 'em out!

The Lunar Colonization Authority Female Cadet Squad

The Whiteboard.... It works

Not really an amazing discovery, but, Skype has a really awesome white board plugin called WhiteBoardMeeting. Check out our incredible drawing that relates to LunarQuest in a very obscure way...


Ok, so... it's not such a productive image. BUT... it will provide us with some really useful collaboration abilities in the future! YEAAAHHHH!!!

2008 GDC Wrap Up

Lunar Quest came, was seen, and definitely dominated as the premier serious game at the 2008 Game Developers Conference this past month in San Francisco, CA gaining a non-academic audience and healthy buzz in both commercial industry and academics. Our partner, Multiverse, was kind enough to have Lunar Quest demoing in their booth for the main three days of the conference giving us great and very valuable exposure. Needless to say, our designated 'demo-ers' were busy the entire time! What to see more of our shannaigans? Check out our pics in a slideshow here.

We also have to tip our collective hat to our Executive Producer Peter Smith whom delivered the Serious Games Summit keynote along with Ben Swayer on creating a concrete taxonomy for the emerging field of serious games. At the conference and online afterwards, Peter's talk received great reviews and we are excited to be a part of the developing taxonomy.

Not only did Peter receive post-GDC press, so did Lunar Quest! Although our university was cited incorrectly, we are mentioned by Developer Ryan Creighton during an interview with an online Toronto TV show called The Agenda with Steve Paikin. Link to it and check it out. We also were contacted by a Belgian filmmaker making a creative documentary about The Metaverse, or the virtual universe. The film is still in development, but when we are big international movie stars, we'll be sure to keep you posted!!

Flash... meet Lunar Quest; Lunar Quest... meet Flash

A system has officially been devised that will effectively communicate between the Flash minigames and the Lunar Quest system. By the end of the week, the system should be 100% functional and the badges you receive for completing the games will show up in your inventory.



This was no easy task because it simply has never been done before. The marriage of the two required all of the following systems to communicate effectively between each other asynchronously :

• Actionscript
• JavaScript (AJAX)
• Python
• PHP
• MySQL
• Java
• XML
• XHTML

Got Branding?

In an effort to establish a firm branding for Lunar Quest at GDC, a number of marketing materials have been made. Below you'll see the poster we're going to use at the Multiverse booth at GDC in San Fransisco as well as our new business cards. We made a few variations of each, two iterations are shown below. The materials on the left are the ones we've chosen to use. The ones on the right are unused alternates.

Space-Communicator2000

Introducing the Space Communicator 2000.
This electronic device is the most advanced long range audio visual broadcasting communicator. Paired up with a MWD, (Massive Wave Dish) the space communicator 2000 can transmit signals from and too any place on the lunar terrain.

Slash Commands

I've just finished working on a new feature for Lunar Quest!... Slash commands! In the console, try typing some of these commands:
/agree
/bow
/hug
/shrug
/smile
/wave
/greet
/bye
/poke
/clap
/laugh
/no
/salute
/hello
/nod
/yes
/slap
/me (followed by whatever text you want your avatar to be doing)
Click on your friends and try these out! In fact, DON'T click on your friends and try these out! As long as someone's close enough, they'll see them on their screens too