Tuesday, August 23, 2011
And Now Begins the Blogging
A WHILE AGO Somewhere in the midst of June, I began revamping this project, again. It had a complete face-lift. The first thing I did was reorganize my directories, deleted unneeded files, and began a crucially inspiring References folder. I went ahead and signed up to forums of future interest, and started pulling many photographs of urbanity off these forums and to my desktop. Having some inspiration to lean on, I decided to begin designing the first city district of the project. I started designing with my favorite vector graphics program at a 100% zoom. It's most sensible to design at 100% rather than scale up, which was tempting to do since the ingame Meter is too small. Scale turned out to be one of the biggest design headaches thus far in the project. I had to determine what a pixel would represent in Inkscape. It took me about a month to finally form sensible measurements, and how they'd be scaled ingame. After this, I revamped my google docs files that were collecting dust. The project was nice and tended to once again, no dust to be found anywhere, everything was brought up to date.
First Week of August
THURSDAY I've spent some time reformatting several documents that were in need of proper format, especially ones copied directly from notepad. Keeping google docs uniform makes it less of a visual headache when browsing it's contents. Now that documents are easily readable it's time to refit the design files. I've been working in the first district plan, trying to come up with both concepts and trying out designs for road markings which eventually derailed to doing many other things in the first district blueprint. Eventually after working in this one file for several days things began getting very cluttered and had to stop and begin separating my work among new files.
FRIDAY Spending some time gathering more pictures. I've been browsing many endless threads on skyscraperpage.com for reference images. I've gone ahead and organized my references a little more, having folders for skylines, parks, and buildings. So far I've accumulated 316 images from several urban forums, and flickr, with most of the images in admirable quality and resolution. It's good to see detail, and quite dire when seeking designs. Thanks to the great photographers for displaying their work! Now, I'm in the process of putting a turbo roundabout in the middle of the beginning development of the first district, meaning I'll have to redesign the main road and some of the neighboring shopping plaza.
SATURDAY Re-categorized everything on google docs as well as updating the project launch plan. Baywords has been down, apparently, for quite some time. If this continues for the next couple weeks I'll end up having to move to another blog host.
Introduction
Welcome to LFRZDG’s blog, a codename for my virtual micronation under development, a rasterized nation based in the series of tubes that is the internet. It is a virtual world akin to Second Life, albeit with a focus on city-building rather than being a social hub. Cities are the name of the game here. Currently, I am carefully planning the mechanics, website, and the first city of the sovereignty.
This blog will be a continuing story of development, logging the progress of this micronation project step-by-step. Right now this is a one-man project, and will continue to be so until a large urban area is built virtually. For now, I will only be designing the blueprints for the first district of the first city.
Foresight
Unlike city-building games, this project will deal with building urban areas piece-by-piece. Each road, bench, and building needs to be made from scratch. I'd like to say that this project lives up to the game genre name considerably more than the typical games of the genre you'd find that are out today. If buildings are furnished ingame, this would certainly push the project towards being a hybrid, since establishments could be explored like a virtual world.
Background
The virtual land that this project is being held at had it's first ground broke as far back as July 2000. I had found a virtual reality program to play in when I was a child and started a town in my own claimed virtual space. This megaproject is sort of a continuation from the remains of an abandoned virtual town I built in with my friends so long ago. LFRZDG is this town reincarnated as an already fabulous and vast land to look at, even with the megaproject barely in it’s pre-alpha stage.
I had dabbling thoughts for building a micronation began in late 2006, amongst many other ideas. I began covering vast amounts of land around my old town, creating a contiguous grassland that enclosed my childhood creation. For many years I hadn't done anything with the land, and stayed torn between thoughts of what I wanted to do with the land. The second best candidate was using it for a large puzzle, but I decided on developing a virtual micronation, which brings me here today. In homage to my childhood town in in what is now a large grassland, the micronation carried it's name. Since 2006, development of a micronation atop the 2006 land has been very spotty, and mostly non-occurring. Finally, in late 2010 I started LFRZDG to deal with developing one city, and to begin with, perhaps just a portion of a city district. Time for me to get working then!
This blog will be a continuing story of development, logging the progress of this micronation project step-by-step. Right now this is a one-man project, and will continue to be so until a large urban area is built virtually. For now, I will only be designing the blueprints for the first district of the first city.
Foresight
Unlike city-building games, this project will deal with building urban areas piece-by-piece. Each road, bench, and building needs to be made from scratch. I'd like to say that this project lives up to the game genre name considerably more than the typical games of the genre you'd find that are out today. If buildings are furnished ingame, this would certainly push the project towards being a hybrid, since establishments could be explored like a virtual world.
Background
The virtual land that this project is being held at had it's first ground broke as far back as July 2000. I had found a virtual reality program to play in when I was a child and started a town in my own claimed virtual space. This megaproject is sort of a continuation from the remains of an abandoned virtual town I built in with my friends so long ago. LFRZDG is this town reincarnated as an already fabulous and vast land to look at, even with the megaproject barely in it’s pre-alpha stage.
I had dabbling thoughts for building a micronation began in late 2006, amongst many other ideas. I began covering vast amounts of land around my old town, creating a contiguous grassland that enclosed my childhood creation. For many years I hadn't done anything with the land, and stayed torn between thoughts of what I wanted to do with the land. The second best candidate was using it for a large puzzle, but I decided on developing a virtual micronation, which brings me here today. In homage to my childhood town in in what is now a large grassland, the micronation carried it's name. Since 2006, development of a micronation atop the 2006 land has been very spotty, and mostly non-occurring. Finally, in late 2010 I started LFRZDG to deal with developing one city, and to begin with, perhaps just a portion of a city district. Time for me to get working then!