Wagner James Au / New World Notes

Last February I told you about Core, the Unreal-based project from Manticore Games, when it was taking signs-ups for closed Alpha testers under NDA. David Chiu, the company's Senior Creator Relations Lead, just let me know the NDA has been lifted, and Core is now officially in open Alpha — and sent me this video above, as a showcase featuring just some of what early users have been creating.

Pretty impressive. And if the video has a decided Alice in Wonderland feel, there's a very good reason for that:

"We just finished an Alice-themed environment art contest with acclaimed game developer American McGee and a charity game jam with Youtube influencer Kinda Funny/ Greg Miller," David explains. "We have more events coming up in the future with game industry celebrities, influencers and organizations.  Currently, we are doing the IGDA x Core Summer Jam." (Back in ancient times, by which I mean the year 2000, American McGee was lead creator of an influential Alice-themed game.) 

As for how content like this is created in Core, David sent along this speed-build demo:

"It is pretty easy to create your own 3D art by kitbashing the primitives that we provide," David tells me. "I never did any game dev before and was able to create my first 3D models and make a game with 2 interns in 3 days in my first week at Manticore!" Add a proverbial grain of salt to those prims, of course, but the user interface for prim modeling looks remarkably like the one in Second Life.

More here. If you were in that closed Alpha group, please share your early thoughts of the game platform in Comments!