Sunday, August 27, 2006

Toonfest 2006 Update

News from Disney's Toonfest 2006 held this past Saturday August 26:
  • Support for Safari and Firefox browsers is underway ("the new guy from Pixar wants us to support his browser...."). The Disney management team confirmed that other browsers apart from IE will be supported. Work is actively underway;
  • Confirmation of "gardening" as the new, large upcoming addition to Toontown. Plant Jellybeans to grow flowers, pick them and sell them in the market. Plant gags to grow gag trees (with a whole range of bigger and better gags). Trees and plants need watering (at the time of the demo the watering can animation was not complete)
  • Wedding Cake gag - attacks *all* cogs you are fighting at the same time.
  • Daisy Duck will be coming back to Toontown (after all, the Garden is named after her. Goofy was just looking after it while she was away).
  • Disney ToonTown runs on "about 40" servers in Seattle. Linux is the OS of choice (couple of distro's)
  • Cog HQ is under construction. No details from the Disney team regarding release date.
  • Disney is lookig into how to allow users with single accounts to play multiple toons at the same time (their stated largest fear was "additional characters being sold")
  • Trolly games in development
  • Account packages that will combine accounts for Toontown and the upcoming "Pirates of the Caribbean" online game.
  • ToonTown pins were given out at Toonfest: Three Cogs and five characters (the blue monkey being my favorite). I've asked Evan to scan them for me + will post a picture. (Some are already for sale by others at ebay)
  • If you collected six out of seven stickers around the evnet you received a set of magnets with each of the ToonTown land names + a special "ToonFest" magnet. I've seen two sets of these for sale on ebay.

"Snacks on a Plane"

My new concept for airports: "Snacks on a Plane", serving tasty morsels to to famished passenger.
Movie tie-in possibilities are almost endless.