I’ve always admired all the creators who design and build the things we wear, use and live in within Second Life. And after all that they can be bothered to go through the work of maintaining shops, selling us all stuff and listening to us have hissy fits when something we paid the equivalent of $0.20 fails to work perfectly in all circumstances.
So if I’ve admired all these people for so long, why haven’t I tried to be more like them? Excellent question I thought. So last month I finally took the plunge and opened a shop on Marketplace. (One of the things I want to make sure this blog isn’t is a simple shopping blog. So I’m not going to go all self-promotional and highlight the fact that my shop is called Products from the Id and that there you can buy the finest in animated rotating panel photo displays. And attaching product art to this post would be just too crass by half, not even going there.)
I was expecting the process of setting up the shop to be at least a little involved but all that you really need to do is choose “Create a Store” from the My Marketplace menu and it’s done. Mind you, it’s a pretty basic store at that point. Cook up and icon, a banner image, oh… and products. Those are nice to have too.
This whole idea came about when I started working on what I thought might be a fresh variation of the display screens so many of us use to subject our friends to slide shows of our second lives. It looked like a nice week or two long project and, heck, might even be salable.
Months later and having learned huge amounts about Blender, SketchUp, UV mapping, scripting and no few other skills, I actually have a, one, product to offer. Yes, that’s a lot of effort for something that’s currently selling for less than half a buck. But I did learn a lot and had fun doing it so, I win.
Thinking Outside the Plywood Box 