30.000 users playing Wee-god

(12.03.2008, 23:24:08) Weewar has recently launched a massive update including the highly anticipated map editor, enabling some 30.000 players to create and share their very own maps. We have talked to Alex, one of the creators of the game. He will also shed some light on how Weewar is now fully compatible with Google's Social Graph API through the addition of XFN and MicroIDs.

Galaxy-News: Hi Alex. You have been here before but please do introduce yourself to those readers who have not had the pleasure.

Alex: Thanks. My name is Alex and I am one of the creators of Weewar.com. I have recently relocated from London to Salzburg (sound of music anybody?). Here I can much better meet the rising demand of Weewar which has seen some tremendous growth in the last few months.

Among many other things I sign responsible for the design of Weewar.com.

Galaxy-News: Would you mind providing some brief information on Weewar for those who haven't heard about it?

Alex: If I may quote our own landing page:

"Weewar.com is a round based strategy game featuring real action on real maps. Up to 6 players command their colorful pixel armies against each other on the many maps available.

And since it is all happening in the browser Weewar can be played from anywhere - including the office :)"

The last bit with the smiley refers to what I see as one of our best traits. The ability to close the browser window at any moment. You can always come back later and pick up right where you left. This got us banned on most corporate filters - but we see that as a particular badge of honour.

Galaxy-News: Last weekend's update is huge. What is your favorite new feature?

Alex: The single biggest change is that players can now create, share and play their own maps rather than just the few we provide. This has already resulten in an amazing outburst of creativity. We have seen hundreds of new maps in the first few days alone. By now the revisions are up in the many thousands and it is still accelerating. Seeing all those fantastic maps is really rewarding for us. Some are based on real scenarios, others are just fun or pretty. Some even have messages encoded into them. They are really brilliant and out-do most of the puny maps we had created before.

Galaxy-News: When did you come up with the idea of integrating a map editor?

Alex: The idea was with us from day one. We always wanted to enable players to be creative. Creative play in itself is very interesting to us and the map editor is one manifestation of that. All of the sudden it is not just about who is the best or who got the most points. Suddenly you can excel by being the most creative. I am really looking forward to see brilliant map makers emerge.

We would like to create a whole eco system revolving about maps. And we are very pleased that we have taken the first big step towards that and that the reception was so outstanding.

Needless to say we have already integrated the map universe into our API and the first applications tapping into that new resource are already being created.

Galaxy-News: How many maps have so far been created?

Alex: This is a tough one as we are consistently bad with statistics. We tend to add in the pretty graphs and raw numbers output way late. To give you a sense I can say that the lastest published map is never older than a few minutes. And those are only the ones players chose to publish. I don't know how many are being worked on privately. I think it is save to say that it is several thousands.

Better statistics are among the first things we are going to add :)

Galaxy-News: This sounds great! What other features did you add and why?

Alex: Besides a lot of interface improvements we have added another set of subtle features I was particular keen on having. Weewar profiles now sport microIDs which allow you to verify ownership of your profile on other sites. MicroIDs are gaining traction, being adopted by the likes of Last.fm, Digg.com and claimID.com. A nice neighborhood to be in I'd say!

The other big (and similarly invisible) addition to the Weewar profiles is XFN. XFN stands for XHTML Friends Network and makes inter-player relationships machine readable. I believe this to play a big role in the near future and it is great to be among the first to support it. XFN also makes Weewar compatible with Google's social graph API. They do a much better job explaining it than I ever could so you might want to watch their handy video.

There is more but really the map editor and these changes are what make this update our most exciting to date! Actually - I ought to mention that we have also upped our hardware again, now providing more than a 100% increase in raw power across all our servers.

Galaxy-News: What's up next on the Weewar schedule?

Alex: Having the map editor is great but we also want people to share, vote, rate, comment and do yet more with their maps - besides playing on them that is. So you can expect a lot more to happen there.

Galaxy-News: Thanks a lot for the interview.

Alex: Thank you very much! It is always a pleasure to be with galaxy news and your excellent audience!

Autor: Redaktion

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