Sunday, April 19th, 2009
Sarien: Multiplayer Game Engine goes Open Source
Ben loves to talk about old games such as Dark Castle. I personally love remembering old Sinclair ZX Spectrum games but also fondly remember Leisure Suit Larry.
Wouldn’t it be nice if you could play classic old games such as these easily online? Martin Kool thought so, and wanted to create an open source adventure game system, and just released Sarien.net “the portal for reliving the classic Sierra On-Line adventure games. With its focus on instant fun and a unique multiplayer experience, Sarien.net hopes to win new gamers’ hearts and promote the adventure game genre.”
Features
Completely browser based, runs in IE, FF, Opera, Safari, Chrome
- Works on the iphone and Wii (both needs fixing at the moment I believe)
- Games are completely playable using mouse or keyboard input. A lot of effort has been put into the user interface to make it work for the era that we’re in
- Multiplayer! This was not in the original games, but what you can do now is; when you are playing your own game at your own pace, and are in game X room Y, you’ll see other players in that same game X room Y doing their things
- You can talk to eachother and replay scenes together
- All game areas are accessible directly through the address bar, and bookmarkable. Giving players the instant kick of replaying a certain scene
- While playing, you encounter other npc’s. These add up to your own list of avatars that you can choose to be, not influincing the gameplay but it adds up to the fun (especially in multiplayer)
- There’s even an extra Studio tool to let you view all game resources, similar to existing tools such as AGI Studio
Check out some of the games and then delve into the resource explorer studio and build your own stuff.
Thanks for doing this Martin! What games would you like to see / create? :)
This is way cool, even without the multiplayer element (which is an excellent touch).
Amazing, indeed!
Awesome, perhaps something worth looking into as I build a browser-based game (http://clusterify.com/projects/list/dimitryz/39/)
Good to see other people developing multiplayer Javascript-powered games :) (http://deepcommand.com/)
Wow, my first computer came with Kings Quest I, and the Space Quest series was always my favorite. That screencap takes me back, and the enhancements layered on top are fantastic.
But isn’t Sierra going to squash this?
Lucasarts >> Sierra
But anyway? What was great about Larry? I think they were always crap. Sorry.
Sierra? You mean that great brand that was devoured and destroyed by Vivendi Universal Games which crippled itself under mis-management? No I don’t think they care too much.
This… is the best thing I have ever seen in the internet, ever. Sierra were by far the number 1 game developers of all time. Thanks for a great post! Gold!