Green Bein’ Productions’ Nick Helton, Collin Caneva and Adam Templeton. Photo by Danny Schreiber.
This is the fourth post in a six-post series recapping the demonstrations that took place at Thursday’s Cornstalks Demo Night. To learn more about the event, see our post, “These six startups will present at tonight’s Cornstalks Demo Night.”
Green Bein’ Productions founder Collin Caneva began his presentation at Cornstalks Demo Night by hinting at the latest developments of his Lincoln-based startup. “Our company, locally, is usually known as Kid Command, but we’re more than that,” Caneva said.
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“We’re an online, multimedia development company. We develop everything from virtual worlds – very complex virtual worlds – to mini-virtual worlds,” Caneva said. On the very complex side is Green Bein’s first product, Kid Command, a virtual world representing Earth that teaches children about the environment and cultures. On the mini-virtual world side, Green Bein is building virtual worlds for to-be-announced corporate clients.
Their latest product, Synch, an online game builder, falls between the two – it can be as simple or as complex as a user wants, and that’s because it’s completely user-driven.
Helping Caneva demonstrate the product on Friday was two of its creators, or “Green Beins” as he calls them, Nick Helton and Adam Templeton. The backstory of the app, which is really a byproduct of their other work, begins with the Helton.
“It was actually created as a way for the developer, Nick, to make platform-style games to put into our virtual world,” Caneva said. “He called it the level editor and we shared it around the office and all of us started creating platform-style games and then seeing who was the best developer.
“We had so much fun with it, Nick had a great idea of, ‘Well, if we have so much fun with it, why don’t we let the world play with it?’ So we went with it.” Caneva said.
Here are some of the features they mentioned in the demo:
- Overall, the idea is to create a fully playable game in under 20 minutes easy
- Three levels to choose from: Jungle, River and Mountain, the latter being their bread-and-butter
- Game assets, such as platforms, enemies and checkpoints, are located in folders on left side browser and users can drag and drop assets into game
- By clicking the “Play” button, users can test a game just as players would play it when it’s published
- Some assets can be modified, such as the size of an enemy
- Individuals asset packages are available for purchase
- In future, they’re thinking about crowdsourcing development of asset packs
- Also in future, they plan to bring it to the iPad
To watch their demo and hear more about Synch, including its social media sharing options, check out the video below. To see our coverage from Green Bein’s launch of Synch, see: “Green Bein’ launches Synch, allowing users to build their own games“.
