Synopsis for Sandstone: A New Approach to Integrating 3D Games with the Web

Over the past seven years, Muzzy Lane has been developing and publishing our respected independent Making History strategy game series, and we have been a leader in developing “serious games” for learning.

In this work, we have experienced many of the hurdles that make it challenging for both independent and serious game projects to reach their potential.  We decided to embark on an R&D effort to overcome many of these hurdles. Our goal was to provide an ecosystem that enabled collaboration, eased development work, and simplified deployment and integration.

The result of this work is the Sandstone Game Service, which we will be making available to indie games developers (as well as using for our own projects).  Sandstone delivers immersive 3D games in the web browser, as an always on web-service, with many other useful features.

In our presentation, we’ll discuss Sandstone and it’s two main pieces: the Locust game engine, and the Sandstone web-game-platform. The goal of the Locust game engine is to enable 3D games to be run on computers that were not specifically built to be gaming computers. In addition, Locust simplifies the game creation process by supporting the creation of games entirely from XML and JavaScript. All games built for Locust are inherently multiplayer-ready and moddable. 

Sandstone aims to tie games created with Locust together with web sites by providing a content distribution service, a player that runs games directly on a browser page, and a messaging system that allows information to be exchanged between a web site and running game instances.

We’re excited about what we’re able to do with Sandstone, and we think it will be valuable for other indie and serious game developers.   And of course, we will show examples of games being developed with Sandstone, including the American Dynasties project.