Yuuguu enables MMOC (massive, multi-player online collaboration)

Sparkplay Media is a business with a mission: to take 'massive, multiplayer online games' (MMOs) to a new level. Born of one of the most successful companies in the sector, Iron Realms Entertainment, Sparkplay was founded by Iron Realms principals Matt Mihaly and Chris Kohnert.

Working with technical project management consultant Martin Best, they have spent the last two years developing Spark, a platform that enables the simple development and deployment of new and advanced MMOs and virtual worlds.

Next year, they will launch their own game built on Spark, Earth Eternal. It is described as 'a browser-playable, free MMO that is a part of a larger, even more immersive experience. It's perfect for anyone who loves cartoony fun. Players have access to 16 races, ranging from the bear-like Ursines to the rabbit-like Bounders to the lizard-like Lisians, which they earn the right to customize through classic adventuring game play.'

But, this is just one of the projects that Sparkplay has in the pipeline. 'Multiple products' are in development and, in combination with the overall development of the Spark platform, Mihaly, Kohnert and Best have much to talk about with their team of designers, architects and project managers. This is where Yuuguu comes in.

For not all the people that work on Sparkplay's many projects are located at the company's San Francisco office. While considering project time-plans, spreadsheets, and designs, each of these people could message, email or share over a network a central version of a document. As changes are made by each, those changes could then be shared once more, merged to create a new central version and re-distributed. Or, as Sparkplay has found in the past 18 months - and as Mihaly and Kohnert discovered at Iron Realms - they could just use Yuuguu to view, share and control exactly the same document, live.

Matt Mihaly says: "We use Yuuguu for exactly one reason: It lets us view someone else's monitor in a smooth, usable fashion. We have some remote people, so when we're looking at a spreadsheet together, or some art together, we'll use Yuuguu to allow us to work together. We even use Yuuguu while in the same room occasionally as it's easier than crowding around someone's monitor.

"It's certainly much, much nicer to be able to just watch someone else manipulating a spreadsheet rather than trying to duplicate that person's changes locally. [We can] watch what the other person is doing as we [for example] alter forecasting scenarios. The same thing goes for working on anything visual."

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Sparkplay has found that wherever collaboration is necessary, Yuuguu can help. By viewing the same document using its screen-share technology, project teams can work much closer together, worrying less about whether everyone is looking at the same thing and much more about what it is they need to do.