June 28, 2006
Volity Games launches beta of its indie game publishing platform
SOMERVILLE, MA - Volity Games has announced the developer beta of the Volity Network, an open platform for multiplayer casual games.
According to Jason McIntosh, the company's founder and president, the Volity Network allows independent game developers to rapidly develop online games and publish them to a ready audience of game players.
McIntosh said that game developers should be interested in Volity's services since they remove much of the burden of programming multiplayer games, letting creators concentrate more on implementing game rules and graphics and less on the common tasks such as network management, user authentication, and player communication. "A slogan that we've been toying with is 'Making "making games fun" fun'," he said.
Volity's developer resource site at http://volity.org features several free and open-source programming libraries available for download, as well as extensive, Wiki-based documentation about the underlying protocols and APIs that define the Volity platform. After games are created through these resources, developers can visit the Volity Network's website at http://volity.net to register and publish the games, whereupon they become visible to the network's audience of game players.
Games published through Volity automatically have public game and player records published to the volity.net website, and will advertise their availability to players both through the website and through Gamut, the free Java-based application that Volity players use to browse and play the network's games.
Currently, developers must run their game parlors on their own Internet-connected machines, but Volity Games will soon offer a service that will allow developers to host their games on Volity's own servers for a fee. The company is also working on a revenue-sharing system, also due for launch later this year, which will give developers the option of charging players for access to their games.
Volity Games is a Somerville-based startup founded in 2005. Its technologies are based on Volity, a platform for multiplayer games based on proven Internet standards such as XML-based XMPP messaging and SVG graphics.
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