Forums » Games » Manyland, an infinite sandbox mmo where what you draw... becomes real

Manyland is an infinite sandbox universe where everything you see is created by all of us together! It's a shared world with

- real-time chat with friends
- massively multicitizen, infinite in all directions, with creatable areas
- placing of blocks... over 8 million blocks so far
- in-world drawing... over 100,000 images created already
- music creation and recording by picking up instruments
- a scriptable animations language called Dynamic
- voting and ranking system
- a forum system to discuss in the world by placing boards
- community events and games, like parties, races
- a casual scripting system called Interacting which can be used to create full adventures, like http://manyland.com/newpolis
- you can create cars, air planes, space ships, equipment like swords, and anything you can think of... Manyland knows no time or theme except what you come up with
- and a lot more! here's the trailer: http://youtube.com/watch?v=g0BcvjYZ3xg

We hope you enjoy! We are a friendly community. You can join at http://manyland.com

Didn't have time to do much, but the concept is fantastic and I saw at guy or two running around. Nice work, will have to investigate some more.

Manyland is really neat, I saw you guys post this on reddit a while back.

I wonder: Do you have many active players? I've seen sandbox games without a goal before and they seem to have a hard time to keep attention. If the players have no goal, why play at all?

Minecraft for example is different. The main task is to survive. Exploring, crafting etc. just happens as a by-product. More or less :)

I'll have a look again later at the game.

Apiheld, good question! There are no pre-set goals, but people can make up their own goals, and they do... for instance, we're currently all busy preparing Halloween parties and games, and recently organized a build-area-based-on-random-words event -- have a look. The challenge isn't artificial enemies, the challenge is real -- real creative challenges (and sometimes, real social challenges). On purpose, there are no invisible rails to drive people towards a destination... we create our different destinations, and invent completely new ones.

In Manyland, you can also create areas with specific goals. This one is an example: the goal is to go get a vacation ticket :) http://manyland.com/newpolis

Another way to think of Manyland is as an open visual chat world. We make friends, chat, team up, play games, quizzes and more. We don't call Manyland a game -- rather, a world that includes games (and much more). It might not be for everyone, but some of the loyal manyzens are now already there for a year, since we launched. If you give it a try, you might meet some of us!

Honestly this is one of the most unique games I've ever come across. It reminds me of second life, but it is way way more accessible. I am really impressed with your youtube integration, which just makes too much sense for an HTML5 game. I can really see this project taking off in a big way. Good luck!

How did you make the terrain infinite? I'm trying to make a giant game world, but don't know how to store the tiles out of memory.

Thanks for the kind words!

The world is infinite, but split into sectors which are then loaded (and for neigboring sectors preloaded) from the database. There's a lot going on behind the scenes to make it multicitizen, infinite, creatable, and run well on at least the newer iPads.

Is there a blog post somewhere outlining all that behind-the-scenes stuff?