Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
around to look at your shop. Remember that if you are fortunate to have a very busy shop, you must consider
the performance of the server and how much lag your visitors are causing and experiencing.
It is highly recommended that you take a shopping tour of Second Life to see what the experiences are
like at the major store areas, especially at times when the inworld population is high, and lots of people are
shopping. Gaining a irst-hand understanding of how virtual goods are displayed and sold will give you a
good foundation for building shop areas that can handle crowds while providing displays with good visual
clarity and ease of navigation.
The next sections break down some speciic aspects of an effective store space. As a shop owner, designer,
and content creator, you are undoubtedly aware that such things as: store size and scale, trafic patterns and
types of display, shopping and social space, visual and aural ambiance, and the search listing and description
settings are all important to your customers' experience and your sales.
10.3.1 s
Tore
s
ize
and
s
Cale
As discussed in previous chapters, you know that the avatars' camera is often way above their head and
behind them, looking down toward the back of their head and the loor. This affects the scale of your shop
in several ways, especially where they enter and get their bearings. Initially, you should let them enter in
a place that is high enough and wide enough so that they can take a good wide look around, but not clut-
tered with lots of content that bogs them down while their viewer loads it all. They should not have to enter
through a doorway that bumps into their camera or have to reposition it to see what is around them. If you
are in the business of selling small things like jewelry, accessories, or ship models, then you will need to
display those not only in the actual scale of the object, but also with larger-scale detail images. Nothing is
more aggravating to a customer than having to move a camera all over the place to see what your content
looks like. For instance, in your
Flying Cloud
shop, you might put a lovely ship model in a central display at
actual size and then install pictures of it on the walls, or on separate panels, to show close-ups of the details
you have worked so hard to make.
10.3.2 T
raffiC
p
aTTerns
and
T
ypes
of
d
isplay
Access your visuospatial sketchpad and recall the experience of entering a large department store. You prob-
ably remember how the pedestrian trafic is steered around several display cases, and everything is at eye level.
This can be used to great effect when designing a shop in a virtual world too. Be mindful of guiding your
customer through an advantageous trafic path that puts many attractive goods in their camera view. Think
like a relaxed shopper, not an industrious content maker. What do you see when you walk into your shop and
do not bother to move the camera? Anything located in a position that is higher than the default line of sight
will not be noticed right away, so that area is where you will put your older (but still popular) content. Like
any real-world shop, you want to put your special items right up front so they are noticed immediately. To keep
them coming back, you need to constantly refresh any displays that are in the main entrance areas. Seasonal
décor is typically displayed there, along with all the interactive buttons for your social media and the Second
Life Marketplace links. However, you should avoid a cluttered entrance full of textures that are slow to rez.
Interactive devices scripted to display and sell your content have developed signiicantly over the last few
years. Called vendors, or “rezzers,” these are the vending machines of Second Life. Shop owners who sell
complicated content such as prefab houses or vehicles, things that demand lots of space and server time to
display, will ind a vendor device useful. Judicious use of these in your store environment allows for a very
dynamic display and will enhance your customer's ability to interact with your shopping environment.