SF0: Two Blocks to GlOry: A Tentative Title

When I was selecting my opening salvo of tasks this one stood out as the most exciting. Part of my reason in joining = was my keen interest in programming, tech, and gadgets. Although the interest is present I have absolutely 0 practical knowledge of any of it. Part of my reason for playing is to learn things I want to learn and have fun doing it. I view this as an opportunity, with what I am assuming is the next phase of this task, to teach myself how to create something that I remeber being so much fun as a little pre-adolescent nerdling: the text based game.

Oh, Zork you have reared me well!

My concept for the MUD (I’m not sure how Multi-User it will be….so I guess it will just be an UD” is that the player will explore a little over a two block area of down town SF0. They will interact with the enviornment and NPC's. Althouhg I took 178 photos for referance of the area I plan to simulate, I'm not as interested in a precise physical reproduction so much as I am an experiential one.


Storytime Interlude
On my first trip into the city, upon moving to SF, I had an appointment at Apple One, a temp agency a friend had turned me on to. I had parked several blocks away, not knowing exactly where the building was. I got lost immediately. Nearly late when I finally found the correct address, I rounded the corner at full power walk stopping just short of barreling into the chest of the tallest, most cliché, homeless gentleman I had seen to date. He had a belly length grizzled beard, ragged, filthy, earth tone clothes that were little more than deeply layerd strips of cloth. They looked as if they may have once been tailored to fit the human body but those days had long past. In his giant grimy paw he was weilding a plastic light saber with a Burger King cup duct-taped to the end of it. I looked about for a moment taking note that I was the only person who seemed to realize this man existed despite the bustling throng around me. He gazed down locking eyes with me. He raised one eyebrow raised in a point so sharp that it looked as if it was in danger of snipping off one of the tendrils of hair that toppled down his face. His mouth moved, but it was so contorted that it seemed to create the pantomime of completely different words than the ones I was hearing. His voice was low and filled with rocks.
“If you give me a $100 bill, a pure Franklin, Ill make sure you see CHRIST!”
To this day, I regret not having a hundred bucks to spare. I think that he truly believed he could make me see Christ, and I want to know how.

The objective of the game will be to obtain the money to get this bum to show you Christ.

Within the framework of the game I want to add other characters and experiences of other players and non players. the player will explore in depth the area I have mapped out and interact in numerous, hopefully, comical situations. My hope is that the final product will be fun and challenging. I will be Submitting a task to describe weird experiences other players have had in the city so that I can integrate some of them into the storyline.


Enough pitch.
Lets get to task.

I took two trips to down town all totaling about 5 hours cataloging and observation.

Trip the First
This started by me riding around until I found a block that “Felt right’ for the setting that I wanted. I ended up next to a vacant lot on Bush St. I walked around for a couple hours going in whichever direction seemed more interesting, flicking pictures and gathering artifacts to digitize as props along the way. I drew a very basic map including which areas smelled the most like urine. It being a late Saturday afternoon, this part of the city was mostly devoid of people and almost entirely closed up. I found several areas that drew my interest. Toward the end of my walk, on the corner of Montgomery and Sutter, I realized that I was standing on the exact spot which was the setting for the story I just told. I had not expected to find it. WHAT LUCK!

I came home and drew a more legible map in Illustrator and cataloged where each of the 132 pictures were taken.

Second: The Trip
I returned on Monday afternoon to fill in some blank spots and to try and get into a few of the buildings that had intrigued me so. I took another fifty or so shots.

Some things I discovered.
I’m sure almost everyone reading this has already found this out, but it surprised me how uncomfortable people get when you are taking pictures of random things, especially when the random things sometimes include them.

Mailmen don’t like it when you sneak into a coded building behind them to get pictures of the inside of a building you find very intriguing.

You can’t take a picture of the statue in the CitiGroup center or the guard will be an ass.

Here are a small sampling of the pictures I took along with the map I made. I plan for the game to span the entire area of the map.