I've been a part of the Metaplace alpha/beta test coming up on 16 months now, and I've been having a look back over the various worlds and modules I've made in that time. Since I was a member in the time before Open Beta, when you could create as many worlds as you wanted, there is a lot of stuff to look through. I currently have 100 worlds to my name, which I think could be the most any single tester has (excluding MP staff that is). Of course that is not to say that I've made 100 engaging worlds bursting at the seams with content, in fact the vast majority are empty with names like chat_local_xw_echo, data_template_test and where_does_UI_live! There are a lot of worlds whose sole purpose was to test a single feature or to try and find the source of a bug.

But there are worlds where I did make a genuine attempt at creating something that would be worth visiting (I must stress attempt). There are also a number of modules I've made in that time; some useful, some broken, some unfinished. So I thought I'd perhaps take some time to chronicle my experiences in creating content in Metaplace. This will probably be a series of posts as there is a lot of stuff to get through.

So where best to start than the beginning.

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When I was a kid I wanted a telescope. So one day I got together what money I had, probably the proceeds of a birthday or christmas, and went into town with my mother to buy a scope. It was just going to be a simple refractor aimed at kids, probably good enough to make out the planets but little more - not that I knew what a refractor was, let alone it's capabilities.

We got up to the counter and there on the shelf was what we were looking for. I was ready to hand over my money and begin my new career as an astronomer. I was excited!
But then I saw something else on the shelf beside the telescope... and I get even more excited!

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More tapping...
Here is a game that I put together in Metaplace. It is a...eh, cover/tribute/something-that-hopefully-won't-get-me-sued of a classic. I think it came out pretty well.

*tap* *tap* *tap*... this thing working?

So I guess this is one of those 'blog' things. But not just any old blog, this is my blog! As in I made it, from scratch... just because! Well, because I've always said I'd never have a blog until I made one myself. Why get something for free from someone else when you can waste hours of your own time doing it yourself? Perhaps not a rule to live by.

Although I made all this from scratch (with an exception of one library for the final interaction with the DB) a lot of the heavy-lifting in making the MVC setup, including the domain object handling, markup parsing, etc., had already been done for a core code-base that is already running a handful of sites. I guess none of them needed any bloggyness before. So really this was just a minor addition of a few commands and a bit of html. Which I suppose is why I've finally gotten around to doing it; it was easy!

It was also a distraction from some other coding project that I should have been spending the time on. Where would we be without the distracting little side projects?

Now that I have it I'm trying to figure out what I'll do with it, which is probably the real reason why I never bothered before now. It's not as if I have any mind shatteringly important information to impart. So a 'real' blog then...
It's been a while since I've had a personal public facing website, and that was really just to host a bunch of little smiley faces that I made along with a bit of... ahem fan-fic. So I think I'll stay true to form and post every now and then about my current creative aspirations, which would be mainly game development and photography of the astronomical variety (and perhaps a bit of terrestrial too).

I'm sure the search bots and odd spammer who happen to pass by will find it all fascinating!