The cofounders of Flickr, the photo sharing site, are working on a new problem-solving MMOG aimed at the casual player.
Here’s a little known fact: many of the tools that later became the photograph sharing site, Flickr, were developed for a game project called Game Neverending. That game began development in 2002 and featured unprecedented community interaction, players could create their own zones, but little in the way of actual gameplay. It was eventually cancelled in 2004, and its tools morphed into what would become Flickr. Now, Stuart Butterfield, cofounder of Flickr, and his company Tiny Speck, are going back to their roots and designing a light-hearted 2D game called Glitch which aims to fill the gap between World of Warcraft and FarmVille. Glitch is planning on launching by the end of 2010 and will be entering alpha status soon.
The plot of the game seems fairly nuts. You are from the future, but you travel through time to save the world by inhabiting the minds of 11 giants. Right.
Glitch‘s gameplay is described as crowd-sourced problem solving on a massive scale. It is unclear if this means it will be a graphical Alternate Reality Game or just a huge point and click.
Glitch will be free to play, and subsist on a micro-transaction and/or premium account business model. There are not details given on what kind of things you would want to buy in such a surreal game world.
All I can say is that the screenshots look freaking weird, but I can’t tell if that’s a good thing or a bad thing.
Source: Techchrunch
