Nara's Nook's Next Dimension Tales channel launches on YouTube

 

Dorena Bree, Siobhan Muir, Nara Malone, Shannan Albright

At the start of 2023 the Nook team decided to work together on a Unity Tutorial that promised we could create an animated story using Unity 3D without writing a single line of code. We were intrigued but skeptical. We decided to go for it and record our weekly progress so we'd have a reference, and we'd post the videos on YouTube so other adventurous souls could be encouraged. Given that we were using a tutorial from 2019 we expected there would be places where newer versions of Unity would not match up with a tutorial for an older version, so sharing our experience could also provide a roadmap for how to work around any issues we encountered. 

 While all of that sounded reasonable in theory, we overlooked one minor detail. We didn't know much about YouTube. None of us had ever made a video tutorial. And, there's probably a good reason most tutorials have a solo instructor. Looking back, it is hard to believe we actually thought we could hit the record button, work through the lesson together and that would yield something that made sense. Nevertheless, we did eventually hit on a practical workflow, and it only took us six weeks to produce the first 15-minute video. In our first one we show you how to create a Unity Project and setup your editor to match our workflow. There's a link in the description for downloading Unity and installing it if you don't already have it. We were already using Unity a lot in our Opensim projects, but this project is teaching us tricks and introducing us to features we hadn't discovered yet.

We start by building our simple space city of blocks and creating simple mesh objects. Our goal is to export and recreate our build in Opensim when we are done making this animated story.

~Nara

Happy New Year: Next Dimension Tales Debut

 

Hey folks, hope 2023 is going well for you so far. The Nook gang had their first meetup of the New Year yesterday and spontaneously decided it was time for us to create a Next Dimension Tales YouTube channel. Our focus is all things related to 3D Storytelling. We'll share details of our works in progress, tutorials on how we create 3D stories, and cute little animated clips that depict life in the next dimension.

The theme of this clip is joy and we're wishing you buckets of joy in the coming year. We hope it makes you smile. 

~Nara

 

Subscribe to the channel so you will know when we post. 

 

The Nookettes at the OpenSimulator Community Conference December 11 2022

 We had a great time putting together our talk for the OSCC 2022 this year, and like all our projects, we had some bugs to work out each time we practiced. It seemed to go pretty well when all said and done.

If you want to see our talk: Nara's Nook: Our 10 Year Adventure in 3D Storytelling, it starts at about 3 hrs 33 minutes in the recorded stream in the video posted below. 

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-w-eC2igalA

#OSCC2022 #Virtual #OpenSim

Thanks to the folks at AvaCon and Mal Burns for helping us bring this presentation to life. If you'd like to learn more, feel free to find us at NarasNook in OpenSim at world.narasnook.com:8900 

The Small Creators Great Twitter Migration

Oh my. Twitter is actually dying. I never thought I'd see that. But the Muskrat, Musty Moldy Musk, Elon Man-Baby, is actively trying to kill it.

I've been on Twitter since May of 2011, roughly eleven years, and I found it a good way to connect with other writers of all sorts of genres, political strategists, or that guy who posts foxes on the hour, every hour. It was a way to post about my books, new, old, upcoming in a quick and easy format. Would a lot of people see it? Maybe, but the idea was it potentially could be seen by a lot of people.

I could also follow celebrities if I so chose and they'd never know I was there, but it was a fun way to be connected without it costing either of us anything.

But now...

The Muskrat wants to put everything behind a paywall because he made a really bad business decision (something he's known for) and he's not making money. People are leaving, he says he'll only show the feed of verified check marks, but he's removing the legacy checkmarks (those who were truly verified before he took over). So the only ones who have the check marks are those who have paid, but haven't been vetted. Good plan. /sarcasm

The thing is, the whole reason Twitter was valuable was because of us peons, the ones who came to set up a social media network, make friends, read news, and by default, see the advertising the big companies put out there. We are the products of Twitter, and the whole reason companies advertise there, and Twitter makes money. By making us pay to be there or hiding our tweets unless we pay him to tweet, he'll drive away the products and then the advertisers.

Yup the first thing was Muskrat buying it and then firing everyone. Then losing all their products (users). Well done, idiot.

A link to the article where the Muskrat is suddenly getting this though not getting it: Musk Kills Twitter

The big realization for those of us who are small creators of art, music, books, and such is it might just die and there won't be a reason to be there. But we don't want to lose our followers, friends, and colleagues. We LOVED our communities on Twitter, #WritingCommunity #FlashFiction, #OpenSim #SecondLife are just a few that we've lost at other social networks.

I'm not going to pay to be a product at Twitter. It's not worth it to me. So the Nookettes decided it would be a good time to tell everyone where else they could find us. So over the next week, the Nookettes will be posting links to places where you can find us that are not Twitter just in case the place implodes and the Muskrat hides our tweets.

So here's the schedule and this is like a Writer Lift. We all post the featured locations of where we can be found (our direct link to those sites) on those days and follow those who post. That way we can get our followers to find us when Twitter disintegrates.

Schedule of Tweets on Twitter:

Friday, November 11 2022: Blogs around the interwebs - Blogger, Discus, Wordpress etc

Saturday, November 12 2022: Alternate 'Twitter' like Mastodon, Countersocial, etc.

Sunday, November 13 2022: Visually centered social media like Instagram, Pinterest, DeviantArt etc.

Monday, November 14 2022: Video focused social media like YouTube, TikTok, etc.

Tuesday, November 15 2022: Discord, Reddit, Patreon, Radish

Wednesday, November 16 2022: Old faithfuls like Tumblr, Linkedin, etc.

Thursday, November 17 2022: Still working but for how long like Facebook, MeWe, Ello, etc.

Remember, post the places where you can be found and follow the ones of people you know. The idea is to make sure we can still get in contact with each other as things develop or disintegrate on Twitter.

Honestly, you won't go wrong with just following blogs because they've survived the Prudifying of Tumblr, the Dismantling of Google+, and the Algorithm Throttling of Facebook. They'll survive the Great Twitter Migration, too. Yes, those places were great because you didn't have to look hard for anyone. But if you've known people for a while, you know their blogs and you can still find them, even when the big social media sites take a nosedive.

So follow us at Twitter for now to get the scoop on where we'll be when the site crashes, and happy creating!

https://twitter.com/SiobhanMuir
https://twitter.com/nara_malone
https://twitter.com/DorenaBree

The Alien Invasion

 Five or six years ago, I created a game at Nara's Nook, using some characters I had created and based on a song that MC Peek had written.  It was fun and whimsical, part bad science fiction B movie and part 1980s MTV video. Later, Nara Malone convinced me to recreate it using a program called Tyranobuilder for their game jam contest.  Its different then the game in Opensim, which was more a follow along and enjoy the dance at the end. This was my first solo game and I worked very hard, stretching my neurons, some past their limit(well...many). 

Afterwards, I filmed my original OpenSim game and edited it into a video, which you can see on Youtube here:

You can play it here:

Finding Your Hero

 

 

 

 

So the Nook gang left off the blogging for awhile while we dealt with real life and grew some new skills. We're back and this is a sample of what we've been working on. Find the Hero was a virtual world game I built back in 2013. I've recently taken some programming/gamedev classes and the instructors invited us to submit to a game jam. All members of teams who submitted playable submissions would win a free class. We had 9 days to build our project. 

If it was going to be anywhere close to what I envisioned in 9 days, I needed some help. Shannan Albright agreed to help with some Photoshopping, our heart puzzle design and some character tweaks. I was down for writing and recording  the story, designing the game-play on the levels, layout of the first two levels, and coding/animating the various characters and obstacles. Sheep Freak did the layout on the final level, managed scene music, and did some magic with the story sound files I recorded to remove noise and improve volume. He also scripted the final cutscene. Neothar Cortex did the event manager and text display of the story.

The video above is our trailer. You can play the game for free right here: 

Return to Nara's Nook

 Welcome back to Nara's Nook! It's been a long time for me. I've been away

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