Five Things To Remember When Making Items In SL

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Great! You’ve just assembled your 244-prim, 10-piece motorcycle helmet! Imagine the kudos! It has every Linden Labs building texture from your Library! Imagine the cash influx at L$5000 a copy!

Okay, now imagine something else: prim tumbleweeds rolling past you as you try to sell one of these. Why?

Second Life has a lot of rules governing it. Some are created by Linden Labs. Others are created by user etiquette and practicality requirements (no bling in crowded clubs, give notecards to people who get their IMs capped). Still other rules are economy-based (many people look for freebies first and pay later), and yet others are related to the universal rules of design and marketing.

These last rules can make or break your product, so read on:

1. A good SL product is accessible.

Think about the first few products you enjoyed as a newbie. Did you like products with well-labeled boxes you knew you could touch to open… or did you prefer the ones that left you with a box stuck on your arm because you didn’t know how to interact very deeply with SL at the time?

One of the best examples of accessibility in SL design comes from the ASM-1000 by Kent-Havercamp Enterprises. I hate instructions of any kind when I can paw and prod the instructions out of a rezzed SL item. At first poke, the ASM-1000 immediately offered a visit to the website for further documentation. From there, it was about only ten minutes before I was able to play the radio on group-owned land, and eight of those minutes were spent waiting for my landlady to drop the ASM’s group plugin down.

2. A good SL product avoids lag.

Going back to the 244-prim motorcycle helmet example… imagine if forty people were at an SL bike show, each with a heavily scripted version of that helmet and outfits of hundreds of prims apiece. Add that to 30-40 scripted vehicles and chances are that the lot of you won’t be able to move more than a foot in any direction.

Lag can come from two main sources: lots of prims, and lots of scripts (or one very tangled script). Try using sculpted prims to take down your overall prim count, and combine your scripts into a refined solution.

3. A good SL product looks good.

The script that powers my Bubble Bee makes it fly like a dream. However, it’s the big, goofy grin on its mug that makes it a keeper.

Products people use in SL are often perceived as part of their avatar, so people approach item purchases like they’re adding on more parts of themselves. Take a look at avatars that have been around for a few months. Chances are none of them have anything with basic textures. Take a look at their buildings, and you’ll see that very few have box-shaped newbie dwellings. Customize your creations to stand out by blending in.

4. A good SL product stays current.

Cheshyr Pontchartrain’s Tardis is an excellent example of a product that handles LL’s growing pains as updates come and go. For a while, Cheshyr and his users were stymied by their Tardises’ refusals to teleport according to coordinates, thanks to SL’s temporary redefinition of the MoveTo function. Anyone who wanted to zip up a hundred meters wound up staring from a new spot only ten meters away, if that.

However, through the update scripts he embedded in every Tardis, people were able to rez their Tardises and get new versions delivered right to their doorsteps! Cheshyr didn’t have to IM every one of his buyers to update his products; the scripts he put in the first versions led owners to the new versions.

As for my own experiences with update servers, I would like to thank the people who make the MEG Update Server for a fine-looking, well-performing update server (my previous update server wound up out of date), and recommend every SL item seller to use and purchase their system for continually satisfied customers.

5. A good SL product is competively priced.

Economic pressure is everywhere in SL. Just take a look at http://10lindens.com. Anyone looking to sell high-end furniture for L$5000 may be facing an uphill climb when trying to compete.

When pricing your product, think of who will buy it. Will newbies, who sometimes see L$1/10 camping chairs as the Holy Grail, beat your door down for a L$2 item? Or will a jaded sim owner gladly plunk down L$1000 for your exquisitely arranged sculpy sculpture? Plan out the features that are in demand and being paid for, while keeping your price at what similar products sell for, and you may be able to stay afloat with some tuning and testing of your advertising and products.

When you sell items in SL, the best, slickest marketing campaign in the world may not be able to keep your momentum going if your products don’t stand up for themselves. So if you’re a new item maker, flush with your first few minor successes, and looking to branch out into the SL world, just keep building from the ground up, adding advertising as your roof, and you will soon be doing fine.