The MojiKan - Virtual Social Game World: Rent-paying passtime that put me in proximity of Unity.

Gooooood evening/afternoon and morning everybody in b-b-b-b-b-blogspot land.

This is a work-related, barely work-endorsed, but definitely work-funded blog entry to give a brief albeit tantalizing summary of my cash-money paid work on an upcoming Virtual World called The MojiKan. Or... just MojiKan. One or the other.

I designed it, and yet I don't know.

Moji: Emote
Kan: Place


I am Project Team Leader on this business - formerly Lead Engineer.
We're in the midst of a mad rush to Beta, tagging Alpha along the way.

And here's an executive summary!

The MojiKan is a:

Virtual - Intangible
Social - Multiplayer and Socially-motivated
Game - Entertaining, with a distinct purpose, and action adventure and romance!
World - Vast... space.

But as the man who designed the premise (to requirements, mind you - not from thin air. The requirements were: Make me a Virtual Social Game World, and I comply) - here is my rundown for you:

The MojiKan is a virtual world in which you compete and cooperate with players from around the world - in a bid to become rich, successful and powerful - much like the real world.
Buy land, Buy businesses, Run for Government, Create an organization... and so forth.

And on the other side, the MojiKan is populated by tiny pets - Moji and Obaki. They are your tamagotchi-styled companions who offer the more action-oriented gameplay. Run, jump, fly and smash with wood and stone. All of that business. In a lush, full 3D, browser-based... browser-based MMO.

In Unity!

And to cap it all off?

You talk to your pets, and they ... fully... talk... back. With words. Legible, sensible, hilarious words. All thanks to a fairly sophisticated natural language processing backend.

So that's that. My rent-paying occupation.

I manage that glorious mess.

In the interim, the promotional side of the team has developed a small desktop widget to give people a taste for the pets and the language. It's not done in Unity, so my apologies.

And, on the other side - my beautiful design team, under my near-Fascist leadership, has put together a quite nice teaser trailer to outline the story of the MojiKan.

So, feel free to check it out, and anticipate an incremental release over the coming year - first snippet - September!

The Youtube video is here: MojiKan Teaser Trailer

Register for release news and such at the website here: MojiKan Website

And hell, why not join in on Facebook? You know ALL the honeys be trippin' for the MojiKan.

The Facebook Page: MojiKan Facebook Group

Actually, you seriously should. Because yours truly - your completely 100% reliable narrator - will be blogging on that badboy! And... also... making a fake account with an unsettling username and posting falsified bug reports!

Example:

Pet died during the day.
Woke up and Pet was sitting on the end of my bed.
It opened its mouth but no words came out.

Its mouth grew wider and wider, until everything went black.
When I woke up, I was very cold.
Is this a bug?

Can YOU resist????

As a little bit of an extended monologue - I've also been playing around with SEO a bit.

And guess what? I'm competing with our Community Manager in getting a highly-ranked website for the word 'Mojikan'.

What word was that?

MojiKan!

What was that again?

MojiKan... 

World State - Servlets for Servers, P2P, iPhone efficiency and You.

Hello people,

Prepare yourselves for an update of monolithic proportions....

Although I thiiink a monolith (mono) is singular, correct?

And I intend to put up multiple updates...

So that's not really correct, right?

Oh no, it's correct like this: We consider the entire update process as a single Unit, and that Unit is a monolith, composed of smaller parts. Easy.

Here's a little bit of what you can expect:

• A* Pathfinding in Unity. 3D, of course.
• Using pre-determined (automatically generated) walk maps, and pathing over coordinates.
• P2P networking. 
• Uh-huh!
• Servlets.
• Google App Engine for gamestate? Can it be done?!?! You know it can, brother!
• iPhone.
• That's right! I'm allll about the iPhone. Got my (our) first alpha build up two nights ago. Greatly impressed.
• Maybe some other things too. I just can't remember them all!

Take it easy, everybody. Feel free to follow this blog, to join the Youtube channel, or whatever you like. I'm always keen to assist, time permitting, in your Unity or wider development adventures. I have many many scripts to share if they're needed. I'm just that kinda guy!

(Kinda)