Whirled
From Whirled
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- If you're looking for whirleds with rooms & forums, go to whirleds tab.
Whirled is a web-based virtual world for player-created avatars, rooms, games and other stuff. It is a project of Three Rings.
Whirled Information
Team
Engineering: Michael Bayne, Ray Greenwell, Par Winzell, Nathan Curtis, Robert Zubek, Mark Johnson, Tim Conkling, Andrzej Kapolka, Mike Thomas, David Hoover, Robin Barooah, Jaime Doornbos, Sarah Collins, Matthew Jensen, Kyle Sampson
Art: Jon Demos, Brittney Lee, Bill Robinson, Rick Keagy, Ian McConville, Nick Popovich, Kate Lui, Sean Keeton
Infrastructure Engineering: Landon Fuller, Jonathan Le Plastrier, Jayme Cox, Nick Barkas
Customer Support Operatives: Agents
Hand-waving: Daniel James
What is Whirled?
- Whirled is a web-based social network combined with a virtual world, in which you, the player, can contribute and sell new avatars, room backdrops, music, pets and games.
- Each player has a room of their own to decorate and hang out chatting with friends. You can build out additional rooms. Most web content can be embedded in your room, including video and music.
- ‘Whirleds’ allow collaboration with other players around shared interests, with shared group rooms akin to a virtual wiki page, and built-in Discussion forums.
- Any player can easily upload and begin playing with avatars, furniture, games, music and more.
- Creators can post their offerings to the Shop where it is rated and tagged, then offered for sale to the global Whirled audience.
What is the Whirled business model
- Creators receive a share of all sales in in-game currency, which can be converted into US dollars.
- Whirled is free to play. Content will be purchased with a mix of the two in-game currencies. Right now only 'Coins', the free currency (equivalent to Pieces of Eight or Scrip) is used.
- It will be possible to exchange between Coins, the 'attention currency' earned by time investment and Bars, the 'hard currency' that will be bought with cash.
Technical Specs for Whirled
- Built in Flash 9 and Ajax, using Google's web toolkit (GWT), Whirled runs entirely in the web-browser and has no download and install requirements.
- Whirled has been tested to run on Windows, Mac OSX and Linux on IE7, Firefox 2 & 3, and Safari. It runs best on Firefox 3 (beta). Browsers must have Flash Player installed and JavaScript enabled.
- Whirled extends Three Rings' proven server-side architecture used for Puzzle Pirates and Bang! Howdy.
Roll-out Plans
- On March 25th Whirled entered public beta after just over a year of Alpha testing on First Whirled with an invite-only audience.
- We will be adding Bars (cash currency) and other features during Beta.
- Official 'Launch' will take place when we feel like the Whirled, the economic model, and notably the creator APIs are fairly stable.
