The long awaited unnamed FPS now has one.  Fallen Empire: Legions will be available exclusively on InstantAction. 

Tim Aste, Project Director, sat down with IGN for an interview about the game.  The interview posted yesterday gives some insight into what the game will be about and how it’ll play.

"With Legions, we set out to create a fast and furious online shooter.
Now imagine that same game, but with a big freaking rocket strapped to
your back. Freedom of movement is an integral part of the game concept;
we wanted players to feel unrestrained by the world. If a player can
see a spot where they wanted to go, we want them to get there easily."

Full interview with IGN

Head to www.instantaction.com to sign up for the beta and get a look at some of the screenshots for the game.

-Dr Wiley

GarageGames, Great Games Experiment, and My GM Game are proud to sponsor the first Game Development Competition.

Beginning on Wednesday, July 18th game developers will be able to submit their games into the competition which runs for two months until Tuesday, September 18th.  The contest theme is comedy, so developers are encouraged to get their humor in gear and integrate the funny into the game.  Personally, I like a game with humor in it so this should be fun.

You can find more information about the competition including rules and guidelines on the contest site.  All game entries must be posted on GGE so be sure to check back often to get a glimpse of the new games that are competing. 

Prizes and Voting

At the close of the competition 10 finalists (chosen by a group of judges) from each category will be chosen and thrown into a public vote to determine that category winner.  That means its up to you guys who wins!  Categories include RPG, RTS, Puzzle, and more.  For the full list head here. 

Finally, winners of each category are matched against each other for another vote to determine the Grand Prize Winner.  The Grand Prize Winner will receive the entire Torque Suite (TGB, TGE, TGEA), winners from each category will receive a Torque Game Engine license from GarageGames.  The Combustion Ent Choice Award will receive 1 Year Free Domain Name sponsored by mygmgame.com. 

Hopefully we’ll see a lot of entries and a lot of cool games from this on GGE.  I’ll be voting, hopefully laughing (let’s see if you’ve got what it takes), and enjoying new games, and you should too. 

Get your gaming development tools ready and make those games funny.

Remember!!!

-Dr Wiley

To honor our rockin’ new orange GGE t-shirts, We’ve gone ahead and released our first GGE application on the new Facebook platform.

This app is true gamer bling, with quick and easy integration of our Gamelist Central into your Facebook profile

If you don’t have a Facebook profile yet, I strongly suggest you fire one up

Head here to add the GGE Gamelist application to your profile.

If you don’t have a GGE account yet, then I just died a little bit inside, but head here to get started

There’s plenty of cool stuff coming down the pipe so don’t miss the party!!!

–Sean

This Friday brings you a more simplistic Friday Round-Up. The number of games on GGE is growing steadily everyday along with the number of users. Keep submitting those games and further developing the GGE catalog. The real highlight of the week is the soon to be available facebook application.

The application itself is completed and ready for use and is just awaiting approval from facebook (however that works) before it is available to everyone. The application simply implants your gamelist(s) into your facebook profile and makes it easy for others to link directly to your GGE profile.

So keep an eye out and we will let you know when the application is readily available for everyone.

GreatGamesExperiment T-shirts!

Below you can see some beautiful photos of the GGE crew and some assorted GarageGames employees sporting the brand new, extremely comfortable GGE T-shirts. Like what you see? Let us know what you think, and you may be able to get your hands on one.

That’s all for this week. I would just like to add that great users make GGE a great site, and we have some great users.

Those of you who keep a serious watch on the site may have noticed a few more new features, a little less obvious than those shiny new gallery modules and gamelist widgets. I am talking, of course, about the new media kit and logo kit now available. They can be found at the very bottom of nearly all the pages on GGE, and are there for your use.

The media kit is a brief explanation of the sites purpose, what you can do on the site and why GGE is helpful to gamers, developers and publishers alike. The logo kit is simply a collection of all our banners and buttons of various sizes. Use these however you like, wherever you want, simply copy and paste the html. Here are a few samples:

We hope these additions will help new users understand what GGE is about and all that it can be used for but also let some of our more dedicated users share the love and compliment those badges and gamelist widgets with a nice banner or button.

With all these awesome features flying around Great Games Experiment these days, it’s becoming much easier to really define your Gamer Identity both on and off the site.

Last week, we made friendships and relationships become just a little more important to everybody by introducing the “My Feed” portion of your dashboard. To me, nothing is cooler than logging in first thing in the morning and seeing all the ratings, comments, kudos, reviews that my friends have posted while I was sleeping and regenerating for another day of coding and fun in the “GGE Pit”. I even added the RSS feed of “My Feed” to my Google Reader. This way I’m sure not to miss a beat of all the activity in my internal network here on Great Games Experiment. Of course, Jacob’s awesome RSS creation skills have made that feed convenient & easy to use with well placed links to all the recent activity in your feed. Click that “subscribe” button of your “My Feed” to add it to your favorite RSS reader.

This morning, things got really spicy here in the GGE kitchen when we added a couple of new Flash components to the site.

We now have new and improved Screenshot Modules for profiles. All of the old screenshot modules have been upgraded to utilize the new Flash animation. The introduction of Flash for these modules will help solve some cross browser compatibility issues and generally provide a better experience when viewing images for a game / user / group.

Also, we’re working hard to make it easier for you to define your Gamer Identity on GGE and take it wherever you please across the web. A major step in this process is the creation of a Gamelist Widget (for showing off your gamelists of course). Go create a gamelist, and when you get to the publishing phase, be sure to publish it out as a Widget and snag the embed code available. Go paste this code on your blogs or wherever you’d like. It’s an awesome way to show off the games you are playing right now, your favorite games, or games you can’t wait to come out!

Also, don’t forget to share and show off your Gamer Identity with your badges!

The Great Games Experiment is a great place to come and play, but it is also a very useful tool. Developers can use this site to promote their games, find contacts, and interact with the very gamers that are most interested in their games. So, we would like to highlight one of the many features that can help you get your game out there: Any game page can also be used as a subdomain. Your subdomain is simply “gametitle.greatgamesexperiment.com.” You can use this to link people to the game page quickly and easily, and it looks a bit more professional than the normal www.greatgamesexperiment.com/game/gametitle. For instance, you could use this domain on a business card or on any printed materials that you send out with your game.

The GGE game pages offer you a home for your game. There are so many different ways you can configure the page that nearly all the information and media that you would like people to see, can be seen. We are currently working on a help document to give a little more information on how GGE can be used as development/promotional tool, and a good one at that. Many sites host games with no face behind them, we have some of those too, but are dedicated to providing a space for those who wish to get their name and games out there to do so.

An example so you don’t forget, the url: http://monkeyisland2.greatgamesexperiment.com will bring you directly to the Monkey Island 2 game page. Quick and easy.

Powered by ScribeFire.

So I’ve been quiet for a little while… this is mainly because I’ve been working on revitalizing and amping up a major piece of the Great Games Experiment — the games! There are two main pieces to this puzzle– tagging and gamelists.

Much like how you can tag your personal network (friends) on GGE, you can do the same with games that you’ve played. The functionality is quite similar and will take you a long way with GGE features both current and on the way. Right now, this is awesome for the use of quickly creating a gamelist. You may recognize the concept of the gamelist as what was formerly the “Gamelist Module”. These modules were slick additions for your profile, which you, in the past, used to crank out a quick and dirty list of games. Well, the concept remains, but the interface has drastically changed.

Read more about Steppin’ It Up with Game Tagging and Gamelists!

We have heard your cries and now your prayers have finally been answered: the forums are now live!

The forums are tightly integrated with GGE and replace the old group discussion modules as well as provide a new place for general discussion and feedback. You can send messages, give kudos, and invite friends from inside a thread; no need to view the user’s profile first. Of course you can easily view their profile if you wish, check out all of their posts, or mute them if they are getting on your nerves!

Full GGE Code is supported in posts so you can easily link to games, groups, and users.You can also embed your XBOX Live gamertag, show YouTube videos and more. Another great feature of these forums is that they are tag-based, just like GGE. If you have spent any time browsing games on GGE, then you will already be familiar with tag-based browsing. The tags allow you to easily search up the topics you care to read about.

So, go ahead, have fun, and be sure to post bugs and suggestions in the Feedback category.

Introducing the Friday Round-Up. Every Friday we’re going to be showcasing blogs that people have written pertaining to the Great Games Experiment.
We’re looking for people that have posted blogs about GGE and trust us, we have ways of finding them. We aren’t looking for anything specific, just blogs expressing your thoughts and feelings about the site in general. What you like, what you don’t like, what you would like to see, how you are using the Great Games Experiment to promote your games. We want to hear everything.

The Friday Wrap-Up will also include new information on the site, including but not limited to: new site features, updates, cool people, etc.

Also wanted to throw out that we’re looking for dedicated people to run subsections in the game categories. We still need people to head the casual, core, educational, and indie sections. If you think you’ve got what it takes to run one of these sections, let me know and we’ll consider you. =) Send me a message from my profile page, Dr Wiley.

Finally, to kick it off, here’s the new cool stuff for this “Friday Round-Up”.

EgoAnt Productions has created a page on their site using game badges of games they have made for clients and EgoAnt.com exclusives. Check out their game page. Also found a nice little blog post from Michael Battle “footloosemoose”. You can read about his experiences at his blog site. Or better yet visit their profiles on GGE and tell them how awesome they are! EgoAnt - footloosemoose

As for the new site features and updates - You can now tag games and edit your gamer badge. Just head to your account page and click “my played games”. Here you can tag games as well as remove games that you may have “accidentally” marked as played, we know you’re just embarrassed. After tagging games you can customize your gamer badge through a tag and change the title of your gamer badge.

There has also been the addition of platform icons. Head over to the games page and you’ll notice the awesome little icons under each game. Easiest way to see which games are on which platform. In addition, clicking on one of those icons will show you other games that are tagged with the same platform. Very handy when building your collection of Amiga or Atari Lynx games.

Feel free to let us know what you would like to see in the Friday Round-Up and we’ll do our best to integrate it into the mix.

I guess that’s it for this “Round-Up”. We’ll be back next Friday with all new good stuff. Stay tuned.