Cuppycake's Metaplace Journey - Part 1
So there I was, the freshly hired Community Manager for Metaplace. It was last summer, and a lengthy drive across the country brought me to my first day on the job – my dream job! I had never been so excited in my life. What is better than spending every day submerged in games, with people who are deeply familiar with the anatomy of games, socializing with a community of future players who are just as passionate about games as you are? So there I was sitting at my new desk, looking at my new shiny computer, and feeling a little apprehensive about my new adventure.
Let me briefly inform you about my programming experience (or lack thereof). I know a little bit of HTML, enough to format some text on a page. I’d never ventured into the intimidating world of CSS or Javascript, but bold text and line breaks are a breeze! As far as Lua goes, I’d taken a peek at several addons for World of Warcraft and learned how to tweak them a bit – but that’s the extent of it. So when I heard that Metaplace worlds used a form of Lua called Metascript, I was a little worried about how long the learning curve would be for me. Since my first task as a new employee was to start working on our public wiki, I started digging and becoming familiar with the API functions that I was documenting. (Keep in mind, I had never heard of an API function in my life). Some of them appeared to make sense at first, like SlideObject(). I mean, how hard could it be to slide an object from one place to another? Well, that’s when I was introduced to things like arguments. All of a sudden there are things like object ids, coordinates, and milliseconds. Phew, I had some learning to do.
So I decided I needed an ambition. In my interview before being hired, I was asked “What kind of game would you make on Metaplace?”. I promptly told them that I’d make a game with ponies, of course *rolls eyes*. I figured that combining two of my loves, ponies and RPG’s would be a great idea. With that, Ponyplace as an idea and an inspiration was conceived.
I pulled up our build tools (which were pre-alpha at this point, not even on the web yet!) and started poking around. I saw all sorts of options – things like templates, sprites, tiles, backgrounds. Under templates, I noticed something called “player”. In typical Cuppycake destructive fashion, I had a brilliant idea to delete the player template. I figured I could make it later, right? What good is having a template there that I’m not even using? Well – I crashed my game server in a way that had never happened before at the company. I’ve always been the master of first impressions. It was Day 1 on the job, and I had already spilled coffee into my keyboard and blew up my first attempt at a game. W00t! Luckily, our programmers here disabled the ability to delete your own player template pretty much right after I discovered it was possible. Some testing really takes a n00b to find the obscure things that amateurs will try to do.
Since things were looking so good, I started out by learning about tiles. I had watched Raph do demos of Metaplace already, and I remembered him uploading tiles from the Web and then painting with them across his world. It all looked so simple! My very first experience was with a free tileset that I found by doing a Google search. I was pretty excited at seeing tons of search results for tilesets – it made me look forward to being able to skip the whole art creation process of making a game. Away I went, uploading tiles and painting all over my world – deleting and restarting every few minutes to get used to using the different tools. I laid all the tiles down and then I thought that perhaps I wanted some mountains and valleys. I then tried to use the elevation tool to add some variety to my terrain, which was when I learned about view modes.
Apparently there are lots of different view modes that games can be built in. There is an isometric view which I found looked really similar to games like Ultima Online, it was almost 3D. Then there was a side view, and an overhead view. I picked the overhead view because it was nicknamed “Zelda mode” and I figured that Ponyplace would be just as good as if not better than Zelda eventually. I didn’t remember any mountains in Zelda, so I assumed that the overhead view didn’t support elevation changes (and I ended up being correct.)
Now that I was familiar with painting tiles, I set out to find the exact tiles that I wanted to use for Ponyplace. I was looking for something that would look good in a fantasy world, something fun and cute. I ended up finding a generic fantasy tileset that worked perfectly. There were grass tiles, mountain tiles, water tiles, edges of water tiles, and so on. It was a blast to arrange the tiles to make my game background, which I learned is actually called a map. I now had the background all ready to go to start work on the meat of the game, which was the pony avatar of course!
This was the part I was most excited for, putting my pony into the game. I figured that since there were pages and pages of tileset results on Google, I’d be able to find a pony avatar that faced in different directions. Man, was I wrong. Apparently I was one of the only people in the world who was trying to make a robust, lush, equestrian world of exploration and intrigue, mixed with RPG elements like classic turnbased combat and a deep meaningful storyline (with ponies). Completely baffled that there weren’t pages upon pages of search results to assist me, I decided I’d “make my own” and downloaded Paint.net.
I am a very accomplished artist, so I combined all my skills that I learned at the four different art institutes that I attended. It look all the talent I could muster to Google for My Little Pony and cut a pony out of a random image from the Hasbro site with the selection tool. Not to mention how I slaved over the process of flipping the image horizontally so that I could have a left walking pony and a right walking pony. And then, the bright pink and orange pony with palm trees on its butt was born:
(Editor’s note: This original art was removed because it’s not really all that original. Remember folks, make sure to have permission before using art from the web and claiming it as your own!)
I uploaded the pony into my world, and figured out how to make the pony be my avatar. When you first upload an image into a world, it puts it into a gallery of images called sprites. Each sprite is given its own unique sprite ID to reference it anywhere else. The player template (yeah, that pesky one I deleted earlier) automatically comes with a default sprite ID attached to it (right now it’s a stick figure). All I had to do was open up the player template and change the default sprite ID number to the number of the pony I just put in. Easy! I now had a stationary object that resembled a hideous looking pony positioned in a brightly gaudy fantasy land. Eventually I intend to switch the pony out for some original art, but this worked fine for prototyping. Things were looking better by the end of my first day in my new job; I had accomplished the very first steps of creating what would eventually be the deepest role playing game the web would ever see.
(Stay tuned if you can’t get enough of the exciting adventure that Ponyplace promises to deliver! Part 2 coming soon.)
Tami "Cuppycake" Baribeau
Community Manager
