Social Planets

http://www.newgrounds.com/projects/games/681865/preview

A while ago, I made a quick game for MiniLD #42, which was around “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”. It was just an adventure game where you hitchhike from planet to planet by holding a sign with the name of the planet. On some planets, there’s an alien that gives you clues about where to go next. I think it could have worked if I had come up with a good story, but I really just worked on the game for two days at that point. One question remained: What happens where you end up on a planet where there’s no alien (which will happen all the time since you can write anything random on the sign). Well, you end up on an empty planet. Quite boring, huh?

So before releasing the game to portals, I decided to use the SaveFile API of Newgrounds to allow you to occupy an empty planet. Basically, you find an empty planet, you fill out a “New Tenancy Application” (which is just a form where you update the alien’s look and write a monologue). So yeah, I outsourced the development of the game to the public ;-P

We’ll see how it goes. I’m also doing this project to learn the API and prepare to develop a new project with user generated content. Feel free to try it. The game is open to everyone for BETA testing at the moment, and will probably published next week. Make sure to play from a logged in account on Newgrounds if you want to create your alien and occupy your own planet.