Sinespace: Congratulations to the Winners of the Carnival Games Contest!

Punkerella’s Carnival Fishing Game

Bibbi and Punkerella are the winners of the Sinespace Carnival Games Contest, winning first and second place respectively! Contestants were challenged to create a unique and engaging mini-game using the Sinespace SDK and Lua.


The First Place winner is Bibbi for Western Shooting Gallery, winning a prize of USD$5,000 (available in the Sinespace Shop for 999 Gold).

Bibbi’s Western Shooting Gallery

Here’s a short interview with our winner Bibbi:

Ryan: How did you come up with the idea for your Western Shooting Gallery?

Bibbi: Simply put, it was the first thought I got when thinking of a carnival game, which was just a basic booth where you shoot moving targets.

Ryan: How long did it take to create your game, and what tools did you use?

Bibbi: It took about a month, to a month and a half. The obvious tools would be Unity, and the Sinespace SDK, then on top of that (as far as I remember) GIMP and Blender.

Ryan: What advice would you give to other content creators who want to create games in Sinespace?

Bibbi: Keep on learning, it never hurts, and who knows what will come of it.

Ryan: What do you plan to do with your prize money?

Bibbi: Not sure yet, there are many things I’d like to do, but I’m trying to resist that temptation of spending it all in 1.5 seconds. But if you must know what’s on the list, it’d be to get 4 monitors and go with a multimonitor setup (2 on each side of my 40″ tv) lol, a NAS storage system as my computer is at max capacity on HDD space (It has 6 internal and 2 external, totaling 10 terabytes) lol, and possibly a resin 3D printer.

One thing I plan on doing, though, is help my friend upgrade his laptop to a mini-itx build, as that thing can’t play any new game as of like 6 years ago, which barely gets more than 10-20fps for Minecraft. Hopefully I can build him one better with his money and some of this money!


Punkerella wins USD$2,000 for her Carnival Fishing game (also available to purchase in the Sinespace Shop for 999 Gold).

Punkerella’s Carnival Fishing Game

I asked Punkerella the same questions:

Ryan: How did you come up with the idea for your Carnival Fishing game?

Punkerella: Well, the game was a made by two of us. I do the art and design, Booradley does all the hard bits like coding and animation. He came up for the idea for this one, I think it was the game idea that seemed like the most fun for him to make. But we wanted a game that was not based around guns or shooting, and that would not feel intimidating to most people.

Ryan: How long did it take to create your game, and what tools did you use?

Punkerella: We actually started it a day or two after they extended the contest deadline, since before that we had decided we were two burnt out from the “Out of this World” contest to dive in again so soon. So spare time for around a month, I guess. Boo used Unity, and I used mostly 3d Coat, Unity, and a little bit of Gimp and Maya.

Ryan: What advice would you give to other content creators who want to create games in Sinespace?

Punkerella: Advice around working in Sinespace is a tricky one, I have answered that in a few places a few different ways. But really it very much depends on what their background is.

My advice to people who have never done virtual world content is quite different from my advice to someone who has never used Unity. If you are a designer coming from Second Life, Unity itself is likely to be your biggest hurdle. So just understand that your first item will likely take several days or even a week of tutorials and trial and error.

Obviously, it is pretty quick and easy to get clothing, accessories, furniture, etc… once you wrap your mind around how it works. But you need to learn about Unity’s layout, Sinespace pack and components, colliders, and of course the rough resolution and content guidelines that will let your things through moderation.

Just know that you are learning something that will take you a few days, but will give you a great deal of flexibility and freedom once you get there.

Ryan: What do you plan to do with your prize money?

Punkerella: We plan to buy the kids each a nice Lego set and probably put the rest of the money in an account where we are saving up to go to Disneyland. (Obviously much in the future when we can leave our houses again!)


Congratulations to all the contest entrants! Watch for new contest announcements coming soon!


This blogpost is sponsored by Sinespace, and was written in my new role as an embedded reporter for this virtual world (more details here). It was originally published on the official Sinespace blog, here, on April 2nd, 2020.

Winners of the Decentraland Creator Contest

Second Place Winner: Dreach-Fhoula—Tainted Blood

Decentraland has announced all the winners of its Creator Contest. You do not need an account on the platform to visit the prize-winning entries. Clicking on any of the links in the above document will load the scene in the Decentraland Builder, where if you click on the eye icon, you can wander around and explore to your heart’s content as if you were an avatar in-world (see the red arrow in the image below):

The first prize-winning entry is the challenging maze After the Flood: Two Towers, where you must navigate through a flooded landscape:

Second prize goes to the surprisingly realistic-looking dark fairy-tale puzzle Dreach-Fhoula—Tainted Blood, which proves that not all Decentraland scenes need to be blocky- or cartoon-looking!

Congratulations to all the winners of the contest!

The Winners of the Decentraland Game Jam Have Been Announced

Did you know that you can help support my blog (as well as the Metaverse Newscast show), and get great rewards in return? Here’s how.


Carnival (the ninth-place winner of the Decentraland Game Jam)

Yesterday, Decentraland announced the winners of their recent Game Jam contest. While there are still approximately 14,000 people waiting for their opportunity to enter the current closed beta of the blockchain-based virtual world Decentraland, the company has thoughtfully included links in their blogpost that will allow any readers to visit the winning scenes without having an account or an avatar set up!

There were a couple of bugs I did encounter yesterday, however. For some reason, the link to the first prize winning entry, The Farm, did not work for me, no matter how many times I tried to reload it. Eventually, someone gave me the in-world coordinates of the entry, so I just signed into Decentraland with my own avatar (which already has access to the closed beta), and I teleported to The Farm to be able to take a few pictures of it to show you here. (The coordinates are -3,-33 if you are interested and want to visit it yourself.)

The first place winner is The Farm (all links were taken from the original blogpost, so this one might not work for you, either):

Another bug that kept coming up is the pop-up message that you see at the top of my screenshot above: a message telling me “You received an exclusive wearable NFT (non-fungible token) mask! Check it out in the avatar editor.” I was told that this is a bug that DCL is aware of and is working to fix as soon as possible.

The Farm appears to be some sort of gathering and manufacturing game around food. If you click on a book in the farmhouse, a series of recipes pops up:

Second prize went to Enchanted Wood, which reminded me of a brain teaser from the venerable puzzle game Myst:

Third place winner Koko Jones had an Indiana Jones adventure theme:

Here’s a list of the remaining Game Jam winners, along with links to visit each one:

Congratulations to all the winners! Have fun exploring! I haven’t even had an opportunity yet to visit all these locations myself.

Also, I have decided to finally create a new, separate category for blogposts about Decentraland on this blog. I may or may not have time to go back and assign that new category to every blogpost I have written about DCL in the past, though. (The old category is Blockchain-Based Virtual Worlds.)