My Mysterious Journey

I arrived in Second Life in February 2004, and was smitten immediately.  I'd loved the fact that I was playing myself in Uru and that I had found a community there, and Second Life seemed to be all that I had found in Uru plus the possibility of being able to create things too.

I read about the Game Developers' Contest on the Second Life website, and applied to enter a team within my first week in Second Life.  I checked that I would be able to use builders and scripters who weren't in the team of four people who formed the official entry - I knew that I might have to find people with skills that we didn't have.

I called my entry Mysterious Journey, unaware that there was a commercial game of that name.  Nowadays I like to think I could have googled it first - then I don't think it was the second nature that it has become for me now.

The tunnel entrance to the game

I entreated people I knew from Uru - Strife Onizuka for one - to join me in Second Life and help with the game.  Many people helped.  We got the game built.  I had loads of help:  Namssor Daguerre for the textures, Cierrah Blair for building, Ratt Foo for scripting, Kami Kim and Catja LaFollette for testing and many others.

Mushrooms were an homage to Cyan

Unfortunately, the criteria for the winning of the contest was the dwell on the land.  In those days, people could benefit from people spending time on their land, and this was calculated through an arcane formula to give a total amount of dwell for a place.  The way it was explained to me was that everyone had a notional amount of dwell, every day.  If they came into SL and spent an hour on a parcel of land, and went nowhere else, all of their dwell was assigned to that parcel.

If they came in and spent two hours in world and spent an hour on a parcel of land, then 50% of their dwell would be assigned to that parcel.  If they came in and spent three house and spent an hour on a parcel of land, then 33% of their dwell... well you get the picture.

Unfortunately we were up against a very addictive form of MahJong patience made by Xylor Baysclef, who later became a Linden.  He won.  However, unlike some of the other entrants, we *did* get ours finished, and people played and enjoyed it.  We were pretty impressed with ourselves, given that we had only been in Second Life a few weeks.  Unfortunately a lot of my pictures were lost in the great hard disk disaster of 2006, but I have a few left.

Once one of the biggest objects in SL was our mountain