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[Evan Balster]

Infinite Blank is an online game where players draw the world.
It's 100% free and the project is donation funded.  Come draw!

[/plug]

It's a game about adding to and exploring (alone or with others) the ever-expanding world players have created.  The world in question is arranged in an endless grid of rectangular 'cells', with a bit of overlap, that can be filled in by players.  Visuals speak better than words, so have a look at the prototype world, built largely by TIGers, as a demonstration of said growth.

The new version has nicer tools and facilitates transitioning much more than the old, resulting in an even more awesome new world.  It is still in alpha, though, so it can be somewhat glitchy.


Update:  I've written a little explanation of why I made this game and why I'm keeping it noncommercial despite its costs.  Find that here.

Update 2:  It works reasonably on Mac now.  Like, for real.

Update 3:  (My kickstarter has met with sudden success thanks to a mention from the Kickstarter team!)


I've set up a forum for bug reports, feedback and player collaborations.


Thanks to Minecraft and Playpen for encouraging case studies in creative gaming--without those two, I wouldn't have made this as an MMO.  Thanks also to pixel artists and their awesome grid- and hex-collaborations, the original inspiration behind the game.  Ooh, and Landshark, Tesselode, CavalcadeOfCats, Baconman, Outcast Orange and all the other goodfellas who gave me feedback and worked on prototype world.  I hope you guys like the new tools.



I can't think of much more to say, so here are some images that should give you some idea what all this is about.

The process of making a cell [a little outdated]


The prototype world, day 15 or so [very outdated]


This is how you chat in-game. [slightly outdated]

[Landshark RAWR]

ARRRG i still got the black box thing even on my new computer.

my card is: ATI Radeon HD 5400

edit: you could try adding an option to unhide the mouse so i wont have to rely on the in game cursor

[Carrie Nation]

Great, the server's finally back up. I urge everyone to try this as it is AWESOME.

Even if you don't draw new panels, exploring other peoples' drawings is awesome as there are ALOT of them.

Cheers on getting this so complete Cellulose. Hope SOWN went well.

[Evan Balster]

Complete?  That's a heck of a word.  She's got a long way to go, but she's chugging along.

[deathtotheweird]

Black box bug too

[bateleur]

I too get the "black box bug". Interestingly, the Infinite Blank software autodetects it and announces this fact, but is unable to fix it! Weird. Is the cause known?

Edit: Also, when I try to edit a cell it says "Accessing Cell, press Escape to cancel..." and then never does anything else. The game isn't dead at that point because it still responds to Escape (and subsequently Backspace). This happens whether I leave the password blank, type "none" or type an actual password.

[Evan Balster]

No, unfortunately.  It's quite a bother.  However, it shouldn't interfere with the paintbrush-style tools, at least.  But then again you'll have to draw squished spaces.

You know, resizing the windows until it's perfectly square might act as a band-aid.  I'm not certain.

[bateleur]

I don't mind drawing in squished spaces (for now, at least) but I can't actually draw anything anyway (see edited-in comment above).

[moi]

It sounds interesting but most of the time, the game just quits.
You would have made your life much easier with java.

[Evan Balster]

There's an elusive crash bug that seems to be new.


And regarding the hang while "accessing cell...", it's possible you got the worst bug in the game: network pipeline freeze.  Re-connecting fixes that.  :/

[Batmanifestdestiny]

This game is awesome!  It's like Drawball, but as a platformer!


This is very inspiring, since I love seeing collaborations, but I never get in on it because I feel like too much of a noob.  This allows me to do it!


Also, will it be possible to have multiple servers, or a larger server some time in the future?



P.S: I made the lava room with the Creeper in it.

[deathtotheweird]

It sounds interesting but most of the time, the game just quits.
You would have made your life much easier with java.

same for me.

and I tried resizing the window to help alleviate the black box issue and the game redscreens and crashes. then when I can play sometimes the game is rather laggy, and sometimes fine.

I just don't think it's possible to get the full-experience with this black box bug.

[Evan Balster]

I wish I knew someone who had that damned Radeon 5400.  :/
And I'm really sorry about the crashes.  It's hard to debug problems that don't show up on my own machine a lot.


Also, Mac and Linux versions released.

[bateleur]

And regarding the hang while "accessing cell...", it's possible you got the worst bug in the game: network pipeline freeze.  Re-connecting fixes that.  :/

Hurrah! Managed to draw a cell!

Here's a few feature requests for when you've got the important bugs dealt with:

* Partially transparent paint (an alpha slider would be ideal).
* Some way to teleport large distances between areas you've visited before.
* Pickups. (Not that actually do anything. Just for fun.)

[Aptennap]

Yes, some kind of artifacts would be cool, so people have something to explore for (besides the cool drawings  ).

[Batmanifestdestiny]

You could even draw the artifacts for your room your self!

That way, I could finally make a Metroid room with a morphball pickup.

[Evan Balster]

* Partially transparent paint (an alpha slider would be ideal).
* Some way to teleport large distances between areas you've visited before.
* Pickups. (Not that actually do anything. Just for fun.)

Transparent paint was planned, but I'm having some second thoughts about it (mainly because it can hike up drawing complexity really fast).

The teleportation thing was something I wanted to have done by SOWN.  I'll see if I can squeeze it (and that climbing hook) in in the next week.  The idea is that you can "mark" perhaps ten favorite places and warp to them at your leisure.  The world will also have additional starting points in the future.

Silly useless collectible pickups are an idea I've been toying with for a while too.  The original idea was "trophies" but they could be more like coins.  Or cakes.  Or potted plants.



EDIT: I asked Melly to move this thread to Feedback from Announcements, hence its sudden appearance.

[SirNiko]

This is neat! I think later I'll make an avatar and try actually editing some cells myself.

I'm running into a lot of the gray box bugs, where certain points just cast me into a blank space. I'll try again later tonight to see if this is consistent. I also did not see any players, nor get any indication any other players were even online.

This reminds me a lot of the world in An Untitled Story, how each of the zones flows seamlessly into the others and forms a continuous yet varied world. I really like that, and hope that players put more effort into making their cells match and flow what is around them when possible!

[Evan Balster]

I think the "flow" thing is going dramatically better this time around than with the prototype world.  Sharp edges are uncommon.

Regarding the gray-space bug, once you get it, you have to reconnect.  It's subtle memory corruption of some kind, or perhaps a threading lockup in my TCP thread.  Either way it sucks.    I'm hoping to have a better version out before or during this weekend, and it will likely try to address this.

Also, funny that you should mention An Untitled Story.  I thought about it yesterday and had a faint urge to contact Mr. Thorson and ask him what he thought about building a little piece of it in the Blank.

Ah, and regarding players online, it's quite a small player base right now as far as I know.  The forums are about ten active members strong.  This time around I'm okay with letting the word out to gamer/artist communities, though.  The system should be ready-ish.  And failing growth of the community, there's a suggested meeting-up time here.

[Loren Schmidt]

This is an appealing idea. I played for a bit, and enjoyed wandering around and seeing people's creations.

Is there an eraser tool? I was trying to draw a screen, and I couldn't seem to find one.

Oh, one other note:
I accidentally dismissed the help screen at the beginning because I was trying out the controls as I read about them. I didn't know how to bring it back. As a result, I didn't have a chance to read the whole help screen and I never got to learn what all the controls are.

Nice job so far! I look forward to seeing the world once it's further along.