Virtual Femme

People ask me all the time how I go about writing all the fiction and the details that I do for work.  (I develop virtual worlds for a living.  This includes the geography, the history, the races, and the culture.)  I mostly use basic tools that all writers use, but I’ve written up a few articles to help others.  Some of this all comes down to basically working at my writing constantly and reading fiction whenever I have a spare moment.  Everything else just comes with being receptive to inspiration from basically anywhere.

My latest contribution can be found on Bright Hub.  I’ve been writing about creating cultures in a virtual world.  This process can also be applied to creating races and such, so check it out!

Creating Cultures for Online Virtual Worlds

I also just wanted to show off my wonderful and expansionist Spore creatures.  Aren’t they cute?

Almost all online roleplaying games require some sort of gems system for their virtual world.  Some games opt to go with real life gem counterparts, and they skip the need to create gems particular to their own world.  The most important decision that these games have to make is which gems to use.  Other games have a mixture of both gems found in the real world and created gems.   These games have to decide which real gems they will use as well as the characteristics of the gems they create, which can be extremely problematic.  Threshold, one of the games on which I work, has real gems as well as created gems.  The created gems are used for specific systems, such as enchanting or giving players specific buffs, and the real gems are simply considered loot.  Other games go with a completely created system.  Primordiax is one of these games, and all of its gems for all of its systems are completely original.

Whenever I create anything from scratch, I still try to make sure that it is grounded in reality.  That way, people who know anything about the gems will not be jarred out of their suspension of disbelief.  One of the best gem resources I have found online is Treasure Hunting: Searching America for Hidden Secrets, a blog written by Kalilea.  There are gorgeous pictures to peruse, and there’s a lot of facts about actually finding gems.  Check it out if you need some good, solid gem facts.

  Coral reefs make extremely exciting areas on games because they can be filled with color, variety, and all sorts of interesting creatures.  In the real world, coral reefs play a very important part of our ecosystem, and the amount of diversity in this biome rivals that of the rain forests.  Thus, a designer can actually go crazy in creating strange beings for a coral reef, and it takes very little suspension of disbelief for a player to be involved in the area or to accept the area no matter how fantastical it may be.  Knowing the basics of how a coral reef exists and the purpose it serves in our ecosystem will allow one to build a better, more believable world.

The children’s book, A Home on the Coral Reef, is a great place to start researching.  It’s simply written, pack with interesting tidbits, and  covers the basics of the biome.

Okay, I recently got Spore, and so I’ve been playing that for 2 days.  Honestly, my husband took me to Wal-Mart at 12:15 am Sunday to get it as soon as we could since I have such limited playing time.  (It’s nice to have someone who understands my gaming obsessions.)  I didn’t actually even know it was coming out because they don’t seem to be advertising much.
So far, I have to say that this game is spectacular and gives me a lot of the gameplay and depth I’d been missing in playing MMOs.  I get more into my Spores than my MMO characters, but I think that’s because I don’t have to deal with any annoying people and can wallow in the growth of my Spore from cell all the way to space explorer.

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“I don’t know anything about luck. I’ve never banked on it, and I’m afraid of people who do. Luck to me is something else; hard work and realizing what is opportunity and what isn’t.”

– Lucille Ball

People often ask me how I get my inspiration for my writings.  Sometimes things come to me as I’m driving around, taking a shower, or cooking.  More often than not, I am inspired by other artists: authors, painters, sculptors, musicians, film makers, and architects.  The key for receiving inspiration is to constantly receptive to input with the game or area I’m designing in mind.

Books serve as one of my favorite sources of inspiration.  My job is to paint vivid pictures in people’s head and give them enough to create something of their own via role-playing.  An author’s job is to draw people into their world and characters in order to ignite our imaginations.   We’ve got very similar tasks.  When I read a book, I always have the nuggets of future areas or instances in mind, and sooner or later, I’ll run into something – a turn of phrase, a vivid scene – that sparks my imagination for an instance.

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One of the things I love most about world building is researching the areas that I’m about to create.  Currently, I’m working on one of our thirty-eight biomes, specifically savannas, and I’m having a wonderful time reading about various grasslands, how they form, and what kind of life they usually support.  A lot of it came back to me from my college days as a biology major, but I haven’t been in a biology classroom for ten years.  I remember now why I loved biology and ecology so much.  Savannas, also known as tropical grasslands, are probably featured whenever there’s a movie or a documentary about elephants or lions, so I’m already thinking about what kind of magical, mythical, or downright scary beasts I can put in the zone.  In addition, I’m planning out what kind of areas could go in the zone.  Maybe we could have a hollowed out tree much like the one Rafiki inhabited in The Lion King.

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