Glitch - A Game By Tiny Speck

Glitch Trailer

What is Glitch?
Glitch is a web-based massively-multiplayer game which takes place inside the minds of eleven peculiarly imaginative Giants. You choose how to grow and shape the world: building and developing, learning new skills, collaborating or competing with everyone else in one enormous, ever-changing, persistent world.

What's different?
For starters, it's all one big world. Which means everyone is playing the same game and anyone's actions have the ability to affect every other player in the game. It also involves very little war, moats, spaceships, wizards, mafiosos, or people with implausibly large muscles. Also: we have egg plants. Egg plants make it very different.

Why is it called Glitch?
"Glitch" is both the name of the game and its fundamental concept: the yin and the yang, the fundamental force, the alpha and omega, the path, the way, and most of all: the happy accidents of unfettered creativity. In Glitch, things don't always make sense at first. But that's where the fun starts.

What does it look like?
We comb the internet every single day looking for fresh and original visual styles. The look varies as you travel around the world, from psychedelia to surrealism, Japanese cutesie to hypersaturated pixel art, classic cartoon to contemporary mixed media. We love awesome illustration and animation and part of our mission is to find the best of the best and bring it to a wider audience.

How much will it cost?
Glitch is free to play. Some game items will be purchasable and there will be premium accounts available by subscription. We want to make sure anyone can play the game, and also make it easy for anyone to give us money, should they be so inclined.

When can I play?
Alpha testing has already begun and beta will start sometime this spring. If you'd like to help us test, sign up now and we'll get you in as soon as we can. (A tip: follow us — @playglitch — on Twitter for special queue-jumping announcements since there are already tens of thousands or people waiting).

What can I kill in the game?
Your time! The game is mostly non-violent and you don't spend your time fighting people (except maybe those who have the nerve to vie with you for economic, political or religious supremacy). It's more of a collaborative simulation where the direction the world takes emerges out of the collective action of the players, rather than the top-down whim of a single person acting as god, as in traditional single-player simulation games.

Can I play with my friends?
Of course. We'll make it easy for you to find them. And since it is all one big world, there are no worries about who is on what server. In fact, there will be lots of things in the game that will have much more awesome if they're done with your friends.

What technology does it use?
(Heh. Nerd.) The game client is Flash (though someday there will be other clients) and the server is built in a fairly new and different way for a game: the back end (java at the lowest level, with game logic scripted in Javascript) is designed for maximum flexibility and ease of deployment. That means we'll be able to push new content — new items, new places, new characters — on a daily basis. It also means that we'll have lots of APIs with which the game can be expanded and extended.

What are the system requirements?
A web browser with Flash installed, on pretty much any computer purchased in the last few years.

What's the point?
As much as anything, Glitch is an experiment in culture building. We provide lots of raw materials and environment, but without you there is no point! Play Glitch and you'll have a chance to shape the world, to form it into wherever your imagination takes you.

Update:
Glitch closed December 9th, 2012. Tons of fun and laughter and memories! Thanks Tiny Speck!

We write to you with a very heavy heart. Glitch will be closing its doors next month. For complete information, please see the official Announcement and FAQ on our website.

Thank you so much for playing with us while it lasted. And, since there are a few weeks left, please come and play a bit more — we're releasing all kinds of things that we had saved up. Some of them are fully polished and others were still in development but, hey ... now's the time to get it all out there!

Thank you,
The Team at Tiny Speck