N.F.J.B.M.W.Q (part 2)

...Being the second installment in a series where Nubile Female Journalists bombard me with insightful and illuminating questions.

And dirty pictures.

This week, our Nubile Female Journalist bends seductively over a lucky chair, and demands that I give her exactly what she needs...

Good, hard, vigorous, ANSWERS!

"How long did it take you to think up the idea of the original Lucky Chair? and did it give you many headaches whilst putting the idea into practice?"

The first Lucky Chair was originally designed as a relatively minor (!) component of a much more elaborate in-world puzzle/rpg game that I was designing (and before you ask: no.. the rest of the game was never finished... I guess the Lucky Chair led me onto a major career re-think!).

I wanted to build a viral entry-point into this game; something that would give the initial players a strong incentive to introduce _other_ players ... so I came up with a task that involved convincing a sequence of people - whose names began with randomly selected letters of the alphabet - to sit on a "magic chair". I envisioned players pulling in people from their friends list, or just asking random passers-by to help them get through this task .. and these people who had been drawn in would all have their interest piqued - "hey, what's this magic chair thing all about anyway?", and maybe join in with the rest of the game too...

Then, while I was thinking this idea through, another idea clicked into place. Something along the lines of "hey, wait a minute... what if I used this same technique to pull people into my store!"

I ratched around in my inventory, and found a nice throne/chair that my friend - Funaria Moose - had built, and put together a really simple, no-frills, Lucky Chair script. It probably only took me 2 or 3 hours to physically implement, but the "thinking-it-through stage" had gone on for weeks... so the total time involved is a bit hard to quantify, in retrospect.

(BTW, that original chair is still rezzed - now with a commemorative plaque(!) - at the back of LapGirl Boutique)

As I recall, the implementation went pretty smoothly. The hardest part was thinking of a name for the product - (I *hate* coming up with names for things!!). I remember thinking - at the time - that the name "Lucky Chair" seemed a bit weak, but I ended up just going with that name anyway, purely because I was spending far too long stewing over alternatives.

Retrospectively, it seems odd that I could have ever considered calling them something else... ;)

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Are you a Nubile Female Journalist who'd like to Bombard me with Questions? Simply drop me a notecard in-world. And don't forget the pictures!