Icarus Studios News

Signs of Life

(Continued from Part 1)

Okay, so, I’ve generated different ecosystems for my planet: I’ve got forests and tundra and a desert in there somewhere, and it all looks swell. But how about making some signs of life? I go back into the World Editor, and it’s a simple matter of pointing and clicking my mouse to create modifiable road segments. Say I make a dirt path, and I raise it up over a hill and then lower it into a valley and stretch it out across the desert but make it narrow when navigating around trees in the forests, and so on and so forth. Then, should the whim strike me, I can select an option from the Eco-Type menu to change that dirt path into an asphalt road. Voila! We suddenly have evidence of an advanced civilization.

Now it’s time to plop down some objects. The World Editor has a huge palette of choices for 3D objects—literally everything from wild stallions to the kitchen sink—but I’m going to go with the horse because they’re more dynamic and every female I’ve ever known has had an equine obsession at one point or another in her lifetime, so it’s a safe bet that at least half my readers will be more engaged by the pony than if I talk about a really fabulous kitchen sink. I can add special flags to the horse, and make it triggerable, and give it a unique description (I was thinking of going for something creative here, like “Brown Horse.”) The really cool thing is that I can then incorporate 2D Web elements into my 3D virtual experience by assigning Brown Horse with a URL (http://www.usef.org/). That’s great, because maybe lots of players have been looking for more information to support their equine obsessions or buy horse-related products, but they just didn’t know where to start. Sometimes, though, players aren’t interested in exploring browsers out of the world, so it’s important to make the in-world objects exciting on their own merits. I can create harvest nodes so players can interact with or manipulate an object. For example, I can make a special flower from which a player can extract pollen that triples a horse’s speed, thus making for more engaging game-play.

I’ve got a very fast horse on the loose, and (depending on how the programmers coded its brain) it’s probably a good idea for me to invent a way to contain said horse. So I make use of the World Editor’s snapping system, which enables fast and exact object alignment, to drag and drop a large white fence into the world. I can group and save the fence and horse as brushes, edit them to make each one a little different, and paste them all over the world. I can have dozens of Brown Horse ranches, if I wanted. The World Editor also allows me to place object generators that dynamically import creatures, objects, and NPCs, so in between visiting horse ranches, players can encounter zombies or dinosaurs or bears (oh my!) who pop up randomly. If I need the generated NPCs to obey very specific movements, I can create a patrol path and link it to their generator, so they don’t, say, wander onto the ranches and eat all the ponies. But simple pathing usually isn’t a complete solution. One of the most important (but invisible) aspects of creating a vibrant virtual world is defining distinct areas. “Areas” can serve many purposes; they can designate town borders, exclusive vegetation crops, the depth of bodies of water, how far streaming music can be heard, etc.

Determining areas is easy; the trick is to design intricate levels and adventuring areas that not only look cool but encourage players to stay in the world. That requires marketing savvy, creative chops, and, in my opinion, lots of lava-spouting Mount Dooms.

-Kara Stambach, Virtual Worlds Team