When
EC Habitats proved to be ahead of computer and internet capabilites,
Electric Communites underwent some changes and re-purposed itself by
acquiring the then-pay service chat program "ThePalace". By making it
free to use, the number of downloads and Palace users grew
tremendously. By default the program dropped users on sign-on to a
specific palace address. Seeing the value in a space that all users
would see, F. Randall Farmer came up with the concept of "The Palace
Portal", and together he and I prototyped it. I learned to do
basic iptscrae (the palace's native scripting) and we came up with the
basic elements for the Portal.
Now
having a location where the default user pops in, the portal was made
to not be a chat space itself but a "links" page. As a precursor to
today's modding world in games, Palace users (officially it was always
"ThePalace" due to some off-color site owning the actual "palace.com"
name) were able to customize their own backgrounds, with limited
animation and interactive scripting capabilities, as well as the number
one activity in the Palace: Avatar creation and Avatar shopping. Any
image could be used to make an avatar - a small picture of something
that the user can move around the screen, representing his/herself in
the shared virtual space. Since we had a links page and the user
community had already developed its own content, the natural next step
was to put links to select content Palaces here on the portal .. and
thus the Featured Palace program was born. I think it was my idea (but
it evolved by team effort) and I spent two years doing the recruiting
and review of palaces that were to be featured (as well as dealing with
the headaches from the the palace-owners complaints about the inevitable
sk8er invasion of ill-mannered juveniles). After recruiting and
reviewing palaces each month, a list was passed around the Communities
department, but more often than not my final list was approved without
changes. I then created the tiny icons (and inevitably larger ones when
the portal expaned to be web-based, as part of the web-inserted
"ThePalace Viewer" version of the program). I also had to make ads for
the "Featured Palace" set and "Palace of the Month." Note that all
art within the palace was compressed into the native 256 color Palace
palette, and the ads were forced into low color gifs to keep their size
to a minimum.
Shortly
after the Portal premiered, Art Director Parker Moore did a total
re-work of ThePalace graphic design, from the P logo to the colorbar
seen above and its incorporation into the "official" Palace Portal. The
image above was a one-time abberation (the basic landing screen was
graphically simple colors, not a "place" metaphor. For Halloween in 1999
I made up this quick screen, with Haunted House drawn in ballpoint pen
and quickly thrown together. I later reused the idea for a more
elaborate Haunted House, as seen on the "Passport Worlds" page.
Note the link above to the "Haunted Palace Hub". It was basically a
custom-built links palace to Palaces that had decorated with haunted
houses or Halloween activities and Avatars. I got approval (for as long
as it didn't interfere with my regular work) to run several of these
"hubs" over the years, with the Halloween hub one year, followed by the
Haunted Palace hub the next, and multiple instances of the "Holiday Hub"
(around Christmas season) and "The Romance Hub" around Valentines.
