Real money!

I met with my Second Life business partner last night, and gave him the "Diamond in the Rough" casino game. He was pleased with my work, and gave me L$4000 as promised, as well as a second game to code. The game is called "Dice War". The player and dealer each roll a die, winner takes all, and dealer wins on ties. When he showed me the game, it had two big floating dice on it. I thought it would be neat if the dice actually spun around and showed the right numbers.

It turned out to be easier than I anticipated. There are built-in functions to rotate child objects. There is built-in object-to-object communication, so when I touch the main object, it sends messages to the dice saying "start spinning", and when the dice are done, they send messages back saying "Ok, done!". Then the game pays out if the player beat the dealer. (Technically, the parent object tells the each die "start spinning, and end up on THIS specific number").

So I got it all working last night, and tested it out. It rules. Here's a lil demo movie: http://www.westcoastdefenders.com/dice.wmv

My boy is going to pay me L$6000 for it. I don't really know what his plans are, but he says that he has more games in mind. I think he's planning on reselling the games to casino owners (as opposed to running them himself), which is fine with me. You need a lot of bank to back some casino games, and I'm not sure I'm into it.

The next game he wants me to code will be called "Mirror Image", where the player rolls two dice, and gets paid 5x if he rolls doubles. Should take literally about 3 minutes to code, given the code that I just wrote. He's out of town for the weekend, he said, so we'll talk more about it next week.

On the Second Life website, they have the LindeX, which is a currency exchange center. You can offer to buy and sell Linden Dollars and US Dollars. You post if you want to buy or sell, how much you want to buy or sell, and the exchange rate you want to use. You can use whatever exchange rate you want, but orders are all filled against each other, so if you put in something wacky, you need to find an equally wacky order on the other side to fill it.

I put up $2000 Lindens at the average exchange rate of the last 24 hours (278). After a few minutes, I got email saying my order was filled. After a small (3% I think) exchange fee, I netted $6.95! So now, on the site, I have a Linden balance of about $2100, and a USD balance of $6.95. I can withdraw USD to PayPal (and therefore, directly into my bank account) for a $1 fee, but I'm not going to do that quite yet. It should be noted that I can also put money from my bank account INTO my USD balance, and then from there buy Linden Dollars, but that ain't going to happen. I'm EXTREMELY committed to investing $0 into this little project. I may spend money to buy or rent land, but it will all be from profits, not from my bank account. Just in case you were worried.

But I'm fired up! I've had a ton of fun doing this in-game programming, and I'm going to be sitting on $10,000 Lindens and the promise of more work to come! And I'm convinced that that work actually can directly turn into real US Dollars. Not much, I guess, compared to my day job, but I'm accustomed to having to pay for entertainment, not having entertainment pay ME.

My universe is upside down, and I'm loving it.