Online Town is now Gather Town. They have continued to ship new features and improve their service in the past few months. (note that while https://theonline.town/ still exists as a separate url for some reason, it’s a much worse product. The free Gather Town is better. Use that)
There are several apps similar to Gather Town now. My favorite is Topia. It is less stable / performant than Gather Town, but also much prettier and easier to build maps on. Other options include here.fm and cozyroom.xyz, and highfidelity.com. Each have different strengths and weaknesses. I hope to do another article comparing them someday.
I’ve found Minecraft worked fine as a social activity, but surprisingly didn’t hold my interest as a world – ironically every time I went to a shared Minecraft world I just… sortof “played Minecraft” rather than actually hanging out the way I’d envisioned. I have done a few specific “Minecraft hikes” which went well as a one-off thing though.
UPDATES Sept 5 2020
Online Town is now Gather Town. They have continued to ship new features and improve their service in the past few months. (note that while https://theonline.town/ still exists as a separate url for some reason, it’s a much worse product. The free Gather Town is better. Use that)
There are several apps similar to Gather Town now. My favorite is Topia. It is less stable / performant than Gather Town, but also much prettier and easier to build maps on. Other options include here.fm and cozyroom.xyz, and highfidelity.com. Each have different strengths and weaknesses. I hope to do another article comparing them someday.
I’ve found Minecraft worked fine as a social activity, but surprisingly didn’t hold my interest as a world – ironically every time I went to a shared Minecraft world I just… sortof “played Minecraft” rather than actually hanging out the way I’d envisioned. I have done a few specific “Minecraft hikes” which went well as a one-off thing though.