Hands-On: Wild Pockets

Clairvoyants are annoying. No one really likes them. They paint an exciting picture of the future, leaving one ever more depressed that it is still stubbornly the present. Previously, we as a society dismissed such visionaries as lunatics and locked them up where their frustrating prophecies wouldn't harsh our zens. Now, we let clairvoyants incorporate and release beta versions of comprehensive 3D online gaming systems. As a result, the Wild Pockets Eco-System is part prophecy, part game, and all scarily prescient.

But enough metaphor: what is Wild Pockets, exactly, and what does it do? Wild Pockets is first and foremost a browser-based environment for building 3D online games. It is also a browser plugin for distributing and playing 3D online games constructed using the Wild Pockets Builder. It is a cloud computing system, a marketplace for micro-transactions, a social networking system for game developers, and an analytics system for tracking game performance. It slices, it dices: it will do your taxes and make your children mind their manners.  All right, so maybe that last bit is an exaggeration, but the Wild Pockets team is deadly serious about being an end-to-end solution for 3D game development, and the quality of their open Beta suggests that they have a great start.

Building blocks

The Wild Pockets game builder is slick and intuitive. It is a breeze to start up and giggle-inducingly delightful to play around with, particularly when you have no specific goal in mind. The default pocket, the "blank" slate from whence you build a game from scratch, has two friendly blue blocks resting on the blank white ground under blue sky, all of which can be easily removed. From there, one can populate the game with a plethora of pre-existing objects and scripts dragged and dropped from the global library.

Currently, most of the objects in the global library are free; however, Wild Pockets has already developed a system by which one can buy and sell objects and scripts. So if you are of a more experienced or more creative persuasion, you can build objects and scripts not only for your own games, but to share or sell as well. You can edit basically every property you can imagine an object having. This is the opportunity for the novice user to have a blast. Yes, you can make your trees float like balloons: and you can do it with only a few clicks! In the Wild Pockets Builder, you get to be God. May you have many happy hours of inappropriately bending physics to your will.

Gaming content

The games produced using the Wild Pockets eco-system demonstrate the power of the approach. There are not very many of them, yet, but those that exist are of respectable quality (even while not being as aesthetically beautiful as we have come to expect from other platforms). The showcase games [which need the Wild Pockets Plugin to be installed, which doesn't take long - Ed], those that the Wild Pockets team feel are particularly good, run the gamut from Cement Tower, a surprisingly addictive block-stacking game, to Sunday, Sunday, Sunday!!!, a monster track rally game with a track the gamer can edit to suit his or her fancy.  Particularly innovative is Dr. Laser, whose combination of 2D and 3D elements provides almost as much interest as its story about robots integrating into human society.

Beta frustrations

Unfortunately, prophecy by definition is before its time, and that is where the Wild Pockets system runs into trouble. The builder and the games built using it have a tendency to be painfully, eye-gaugingly slow. My computer and internet connection just aren't fast enough for Wild Pockets yet, which leads to jerky, skipping games.

If you are fortunate enough to have a miraculously fast internet connections and an equally fast computer, it's the controls that will frustrate you, in both the builder and in the games. There is no way to rotate the camera angle, and navigating with only the arrow keys forces you to move in series of awkward right angles, which is highly restrictive in a 3D environment and very distracting. Then, catastrophically, there is no undo function in the builder. Delete half an afternoon’s work? Well, best hope you saved right before that, or you are sadly out of luck.

Other controls within the Builder are equally frustrating: I consistently failed to place objects on the ground. At least one tutorial referred to a mysterious “Drop” button which would perform that task, but it was nowhere to be found. This deficit led to several hilarious incidents with sheep dropping from the heavens. Hopefully, as the Beta evolves, these issues will be resolved.

Foundation for years to come

Speed and control issues notwithstanding, Wild Pockets is still something to write home about. The end-to-end system stands poised to usher in a revolution: it will democratize the world of 3D game building. All of you folks who have been waiting for the opportunity to launch your own game development company from your bedroom or your garage, wait no longer. The global library and micro-transaction framework mean that developers needn’t wait to develop skills they do not already possess. Need a script? Someone has already written it. Need something rendered? That’s there, too. Want an artist to collaborate with on a game? Ask for one and someone in the community will respond.

The Wild Pockets system is poised to transform 3D game development into a highly collaborative community with a low barrier to entry. The potential for building on and remixing the works of other developers is limited only by the imaginations of those constructing games. These factors, in combination with the comparatively short development time needed to create a game in the Wild Pockets environment, means that the future of 3D gaming is likely to be filled with experimental, innovative games created by people who would never have been able to construct something similar under the current development models. Under the Wild Pockets model, developers have the freedom to do what they do best: create. With Wild Pockets, gamers win.

All in all, the Wild Pockets system is almost as addictive as it is maddeningly frustrating, but such is the way of prophecy. Look closely, ladies and gentlemen: even in its Beta form Wild Pockets is clearly the future of internet gaming.

Unfortunately, we haven’t quite reached the future yet… but when we do, it is going to be awesome.

A two part interview with the CEO Wild Pockets Shanna Tellerman with Part 1 and Part 2 here.