Building Shelter
I've been hosting a game at the Shelter which I built named Building Shelter. Mera Pixel assisted tremendously in the design of the game as it looks today and many, many alpha and beta testers contributed to the current game flow. Carl Metropolitan, Salem Penguin, Sumar Morgan, Travis Lambert and many others all had amazing constructive criticism and helped me shape it into life.
A tagline that we adopted when Mera pointed out that I had reused the theme "silly" a few times: Building Shelter - The game show where the themes can be reused, but prims cannot!
Somewhere along the line I had volunteered to host Payment Podium, a game show held at the Shelter. I was happily assigned Sunday nights. I really enjoyed the hosting aspect of the game. Watching and taking part in the banter and social interaction while "competing" for some prize or another is enjoyabe to me.
So, at some point Travis from the Shelter mentioned to me that it would be possible for me to host my own game show if I wanted to try to build one. I started thinking about it, investigating building and scripting, and considering what kind of game to make. I considered a Wheel of Fortune style show*. I considered maybe a Jeopardy game show with the question board for contestants to pick from. Travis encouraged me to go ahead and think outside the trivia space.
I started working on Building Shelter. I gave it the working title "Sheltered Constructor" and it started out as 3 rectangular prims. The center prim was the main controller. It would display information about what state the game was currently in - build or vote. One side prim was used to distribute a rules card (inpired by Carl Metropolitan's Trivial Obsession stage set with the rules on a side panel.) The other side prim would appear during vote phase and you would click it to cast a vote.
I started formulating the idea of a holo vendor to give away entries that had been built during the game. I consulted with Lars Bismark a bit who encourage the idea and really helped quite a bit with the philosophy and goals of the project and the user interaction/workflow of the game.
While I was working on this idea I also started creating some inexpensive t-shirts to sell on the second floor of the Shelter. I also sought out some outside vendor space for the heck of it and came across Salem Penguin and his free vendor space offer. After Salem and I had interacted a bit and formed a bit of a friendship he invited me to a game he was hosting, one that he had built. The game is called SLictionary. Playing a single round of SLictionary did it for me! Boom! The rest of the game itself fell into place - I knew how Sheltered Constructor had to behave.
I told Salem about my game and he came and helped with some alpha testing. On one of these alpha test games Carl Metropolitan (I'm quite sure it was him, hope I'm not attributing this to the wrong helpful person) suggested that the name "Sheltered Constructor" might be better changed to "Building Shelter". It took a while, quite a while, but I never forgot the suggestion. A few weeks or more later I bit the bullet and changed the name of the game.
I suppose that this is the point in this pointless story where Mera Pixel comes into play. I met Mera at the Shelter one evening when she had just started playing the game. I was in one of my usual silly moods and I was giving her a hard time in my "is this guy for real" or "I hope that was a joke!" way. I was immediately impressed by Mera. She was amusing, took a joke well, went along with jokes and had some wonderfully witty come backs. She paid attention and made a point of beating a bad joke to death as I too often do. Somewhere in our discussion then or shortly after Mera made the mistake of informing me that she has certain skills in graphic art.
If I recall correctly Mera and Coal built some creations for a beta test round of Building Shelter. This would be after Travis assisted me in adding a stage floor with circular or square playing pads. Seeing Mera online while I was about to put some more work into the thing I asked her if she'd be interested in helping out. Wow! She built the audience stands and she redesigned or at least re-inspired every texture. As far as build components in the current Building Shelter game I'm responsible for the milk crate and the sponsor sign. That's pretty much it ;) Thankfully I'm responsible for the scripts or I'd just hand the thing over to her and walk away crying.
Things got going really fast once Mera added polish and shine to the game. I'm so very pleased that the game is doing well and that it is reaching all of its original intended goals.
Here is a snapshot of the prims I'm responsible for, more or less:
Here are some folks hard at work. Note that Mera is hosting this game with Travis standing up in the audience:
(*FireEyes now hosts a nice Wheel of Fortune style show that he built. He holds the game on Saturday nights at the Shelter.)