| Pearl Island

Month Two

I have been working on this new island for about two months now. That sounds like a long time, but of course I’m not doing this full time, every day.

The process of creating this island is fun. So far I’m mostly using pre-builds from other creatives that I can buy on the Linden owned market place. I enjoy world building, I will continue, even it costs really a lot of money to run a sim in Second Life, too much really for what it is.

A fun detail I added was something like a revolving door to the sim. It’s a telehub, which cycles through a list of locations, so visitors start in one of four rez zones. I’m hoping to mix up the experience a bit this way and provoke new perspectives, and thus, new story lines.

I started carving out six sections on the island:

The Windy City, which harbours the headquarters for the Orion development and a Library. Under the city are caves, they seem to go deep.
There is now a version of the Hide-Out Forest, a place where Elfs might live. I’m planning for events to take place there.
The swamps are, similar to the Underwater world, just a hint of what they could become.
Most of my attention currently goes into in the big Crash Valley, a rocky scar across the island. It was dug by Rhea’s spaceship thousands of years ago, and has long become part of the landscape.

The Valley. An ancient scar.

All of these locations are just sketches of what they will be. For example, the Caves need some cave drawings and a connecting tunnel to the underworld underneath the Arena, there are no fish yet in the ocean and, and , and. So much to do, so little time.

One prominent part still missing is a section, which might serve Vampires as a home. I have no vision yet for that place. It has to be something windowless I guess.

The plan now is, to reach out to partners, to people, who would like to build and design parts of the sim. These kind of people will be even more tricky to find than the shy players I hoped to attract.

Speaking of which, the biggest frustration currently comes from not yet finding any players. One of the reasons I wanted to build Black Pearl Island in Second Life, instead of using a gaming engine like Unity or Unreal, was the instant connection to an existing player base, who chat so much about the decline of role play in Second Life. Either one of these game engines would provide a multitude of technical and visual options. But, while I received lots of encouragement and praise for the sim, hardly anybody actually wants to play.