Want to know a secret?

Want to know a secret? Today I feel like telling you why I stopped developing stuff for There for a while.

It's partly because I was doing stuff for IMVU, partly the frustration with pricing (the pricing on some items just doesn't make sense, like for lamps) and partly because currency sales was taking up a lot of my time, but MOSTLY it was because I felt like a failure.

It started with the Wild West event. I had planned to make quite a few items for it, in fact when they were planning it I was like "ooh, oooh...I'll make this and that and I can make that other thing, too!" It's like I didn't want ANYONE else to make anything. I would have liked to make the entire Wild West all by myself.

I think I should be forgiven for this a little bit as I think it's natural for There Developers to be somewhat solitary, and the more people are working on stuff together the more they have to cooperate, which is not only hard, it takes time away from developing. My goodness, you should have seen Meret with his Christmas village. Not only did he want to do most everything himself, he wanted to enforce a huge number of aesthetic and other guidelines on developers, who were acting like cats trying to be herded, myself included. In the end, I didn't end up doing anything for that project, but my point is that developers are just like that. They generally want to be in control and they want to do what they want to do and they don't always play well with others, myself included.

I did do quite a few items for the Wild West. I made decks and buildings which I think were the first 40 meter dev items in-world, I made a water tower with couches for supports, a bunch of signs, benches, jail cells, a wild west bar which I believe had the first varied-level seating on it (one of the seats is ON the top of the bar, it wouldn't be weird at all now, but at the time it pretty much had to be snuck in) and a bunch of other stuff...I think I'm most proud of the staircase, which took quite a long time and is available actually attached to a second story floor, and I think without the floor as well. I also made a bunch of tombstones and some coffin seating groups for the Undertakers.

Despite all the items I DID make, I failed because of all the stuff I DIDN'T make, because I didn't allow enough time, I bit off more than I could chew, etc. There was supposed to be a whole general store and the only thing I ever got done for that was a catalog and a bench that had the catalog built into it. It was really discouraging...I don't know that anyone even noticed there was stuff "missing", but *I* sure did.

Then, I hadn't made anything for There for a while because of IMVU but I wanted to spend some time on There stuff again so I was going to enter this virtual world contest that was something about public spaces. I totally didn't allow enough time for this. This is my "Parkway" stuff. I didn't get all the pieces I wanted done with it, OR the matching website that was supposed to go along with it, and when nearing the deadline for entries I was frantically trying to put the pieces I DID have together. Argh...I am one of the worst in-world builders and I just couldn't get it together quite right plus some of the collision meshes weren't working the way I wanted. Basically, it simply wasn't done. I was really upset about this.

Then finally, I had a folder on one computer that held most of my There stuff and the folders starting with A, B and C just went missing. Poof, gone. This included a TON of builder items. Most of my builder items, actually. I thought maybe I had burned them onto DVD or CD to make room on my hard drive, but I searched everywhere and couldn't find those files. It was very strange and made me pretty paranoid AND very discouraged.

So there you go...that is why I stopped developing for There. But, today I am going to see if I can export a builder item from 3ds max...something that never worked for me on my old computers (I've made all my There stuff in Gmax.) It seems like TheChaz has done a good job of packing up the exporters to properly install, so I'm quite hopeful it will work. I just want to have some FUN making stuff, y'know?

Then later...maybe I will have some more secrets for you.