San Francisco, Calif. - Wild Pockets, the cloud-based 3D game development environment, unveiled a new version of its free, 3D game builder. The latest version includes a new content management and project collaboration system, making it even easier to create 3D games, and a completely redesigned user interface and API improvements, including a new animation system. In addition, Wild Pockets has launched an online gallery for artists to showcase and share 3D models.
“Wild Pockets is more than just a development tool, it’s an end-to-end solution that makes 3D game development and distribution faster and more simple than any other platform on the market,” says Shanna Tellerman, CEO of Wild Pockets. “The cloud-based environment offers a community-generated asset library, online file storage, instant distribution of games and simple collaboration features.”
Wild Pockets Version 1.6 features a completely rebuilt file management system that lets developers more easily manage assets and set permissions for assets giving multiple levels of access to their team or to the Wild Pockets community at large. In addition, developers can now develop games locally, on their computer, and on the Wild Pockets servers simultaneously. This gives game developers the opportunity to use in their game live assets from the global Wild Pockets library, while making local changes to other parts of the game. It also gives multiple developers the opportunity to collaborate on the same game, making changes to their respective files on their own computers while using the latest functional server copies of each other's files. The ability to work online and locally, simultaneously, greatly improves collaboration and makes testing much easier – developers can share their game for testing by others and continue developing while they await feedback. Finally, the updated interface and APIs are easier to use and more intuitive, including the redesigned animation system, which offers greater control over synchronization.
The Wild Pockets Model Gallery is a new way for artists to share their 3D art with an active community of game developers. Artists typically create models in Blender, Autodesk 3ds Max or Autodesk Maya. With Wild Pockets’ new interface they can publish 3D models built in any of those three applications in one simple step, instantly exposing their assets to Wild Pockets game developers. Models published to the Wild Pockets Gallery are public for anyone to view and can be easily searched and sorted by subject matter, popularity, latest and so on. In addition, the Wild Pockets interface allows artists to embed their 3D models on any web page, and a game developer can preview any model inside of their game to see how it works, which speeds time to development and improves the quality of the game.
Tellerman continues, “The Wild Pockets community is so vibrant and creative. Many of the improvements we’ve made to the development ecosystem are thanks to their insight and passion for 3D games.”
Wild Pockets and Microsoft are sponsoring the second annual Bay Area Game Jam, a 24-hour event where independent game developers compete to create the best 3D game using the Wild Pockets development platform. The event is being held May 15-16th at Microsoft’s Silicon Valley Campus.