Zuma Beach

Our group have purchased an island in second life, we have the island for 7 days, which cost around £20 (about L$10,000), whilst this was a lot, the island was freely transformable, meaning we could terraform the land, and make necessary restrictions to make the game playable.




As we were playing two games we decided to separate the courses with a wall, this meant that the contents of the two maps remained a secret to the users until it was time to enter (as the players had no flying ability.


We wanted the games to be themed, the original idea was to have a game of "cops and robbers" in which the players would be dressed as robbers if they were not it and a cop if they were it, this however wasn't possible as it wasn't possible to code the outfits onto the players.
We stuck with the theme of cops and robbers but in a fairytale enviroment.




I then decided to have one area themed as a sort of fairytale land, this area would have castles, dragons, magic trees (not the air freshener!), a humpty dumpty, an insie winsy spider and all other manor of things, getting the castle was easy, i found a store which sold them for about L$5 with loads of free furniture, I put a few trees in at the top of the hill and went on the hunt for other things. This proved a lot harder than anticipated and all the items I found were either rubbish or lagged the game up so much they weren't worth the effort.





I therefore moved onto the other area, as this was totally blank and something needed to be put there for there to be any sort of event, I settled on a sort of housing estate, which would restrict the movements of the players to a street with houses lined along it meaning people would be hiding in houses as well as running around the streets making almost like hide and seek and tag mixed together, this was also a problem however as there weren't many prefab houses that matched up enough to build up an estate, I was also unsure about how to make a road.
The theme for this was Zombies, sort of like the film Shuan of the Dead



I tried to build my own items but the interface in second life didn't seem to agree with me and I just ended up getting rather frustrated and building very primitive items.


What we ended up with was frankly rubbish! This was due to me not finding many prefabs, my lack of experience at playing SL and also with only a few days to build it (for the first game) the final result wasn't very impressive.
For the second game I have somewhat improved this but it still isn't quite as good as I'd have liked.


In hindsight I was very over ambitious as to what I could achieve and should have went for something simpler with the time-frame we were given, however if we had land and more L$ from the beginning I'd have probably been able to easily complete the two courses.