By: Arinos
This tutorial will hopefully help improve your dream building "eye". It's intended for those who know how to use the dream editor (we've written a tutorial on that) but might say they can't scape, or for those having difficulty when trying to choose where to put stuff. It's also for those of you who, once you've built a dream think it might be off-scale, messy, or the colors don't seem to want to play nicely together.
Scaping is as much about art as drawing the objects you can use. In scaping, you pour a soul into a dream. All dreams are good. Each one is something that no one else has done. There will never be a dream exactly like yours. That's what makes it wonderful and special. Each one is a treasure.
Furcadia has graciously provided you with all the tools you need to build a dream. The dream editor just happens to be the same size as your Furcadia screen. This is important because you'll see your dream just as you would if you walked through it. When furres come to see your dream, they're coming to *see* it. That means that they'll be looking all over the place. They need something to look at.
Logic is pretty important in dream scaping. People, and subsequently furres, wouldn't build something for no reason. If a house gets built in a town - it's usually built for someone. If a business is built - it's built for someone. And all of those someone's have personalities that come out in what they build. Look at the buildings around you. Look at houses. In an apartment, everyone has basically the same layout - and yet, each one is different because each person is different. You should keep this in mind when you're thinking about what to put in. Each room that you build ought to be built so that it tells some kind of story. Furres like stories. If you make a character up in your head to live in the house you're scaping - you might make him a collector of pillows, or a neat freak, or a crabby old veteran who's lived there for years and never cleaned a day in his life. That personality is going to bleed into the house. Some families are hustle bustle while some are laid back and retired.
All of this gives the dream some variety. Most furres don't like to see the same 12 tiles over and over and over. It's boring - they've come to see stuff. They want to be entertained. So that 20 X 15 room with the same floor and not much else in it isn't going to thrill them as much as a 20 X 15 room with little areas carved out with secret nooks, tiny gardens, water features, and furniture. They wanna see stuff, so your job, as a scaper, is to give them things to see.
Now remember when I said that the dream editor is conveniently the same size as your Furcadia screen? This helps you quite a bit with "areas". Standing at the entrance to your dream, you should have at least one "area" with little teases at the edge of the screen that lure you into other areas. In fact, if you do this throughout your dream, your guests will be lured from one room into another, from one area of the garden into another, or from a room into a room.
There is density in scaping. A very dense dream gives you more to look at, but at the same time, makes getting to and fro difficult, if not annoying. A very sparse dream lets you run as fast as you want, but you'll have to run to keep your visitors from getting bored and falling asleep. Somewhere in the middle seems to be a good place. Leaving room to walk in a mostly direct line from Room A to Room B, but filling it enough that they'll say "Ou! I love that little book nook, or "Wow! I like that little pond" will ensure that your visitors aren't annoyed, but aren't bored out of their skulls.
Now let's get back to logic. There is nothing more painful than scampering up a stair to run into a wall on the next floor - or walking through a door and finding yourself pressed up against a 20' pillar with spikes. Those problems aren't logical. Your doctors office doesn't put a wall or giant vase 3' in front of there door, so neither should you. The mechanics of furc come in to play here too. When you step on a stair, you tend to step one more time to go up. So when you land on the stair above, you also take at least one more step - sometimes a few - especially when you're running full hilt in a sparse dream. Slamming into something is pretty abrupt and unless you are building a carnival fun house or that crazy mansion that makes no sense at all - placing objects in the way is illogical.
Leave your visitors room to walk in and come to a complete stop so that they can see what a great job you've done. Now this isn't always going to be possible - so, use it as a rule of thumb. You could also use this knowledge to torture furres - but that would be in a different tutorial.
Directions are important too. When you walk through a door going Northeast, you should walk in to the room you're going to from the Southwest. If you go up a stair headed northwest, you should land on a landing where behind you the stair goes down to the southeast. In other words, your stairs need to stay with their matching pairs. When you go downstairs in a house, you get to the bottom and turn around and look UP the stairs you just came down from. Stairs normally don't change direction mid flight unless there is a landing so you can keep your balance. When you open a door, you expect the room to be ahead of you - not land with your nose pressed against a wall.
Logic is logic.
Now let's talk about color. Color has as much to do with a dream as putting all the pieces where you want them. There are some basic rules about color. Anything black tends to "disappear". Your eye registers an area of "nothing". Try making a black square and then put anything at all in the middle of that. What do you see? Where is your eye drawn? It's drawn to the object, because your eye doesn't want to look at "nothing" - you want to see something - and so do your visitors.
Knowing that black registers as "nothing", you can use this one tiny rule of thumb to great advantage. You can make black floors and black walls - and then put something inside it - something non-black - and immediately that something is the focal point of the entire room - there is lots of nothing - but only this one thing - must look at the bright shiny object O.O ouuuuuu. That's great if you really need to catch attention to something important or want them to walk in and "feel" eyes watching them.
The other thing to remember about color is to layer light on dark and dark on light. When you use, for example, a purple object where there is a purple wall, the object is going to blend in or at least the parts that match the wall will blend in. You won't notice the object very well if it's blending in with the background. Light colors show up very well on dark colors, and dark colors tend to leave your eye looking for something to look at - it makes the light more light.
Experiment with this. If you want a cave no one will notice, put in black rocks with the opening as black. then surround the cave's entrance with things that are light or bright like flowers or big white mushrooms. Then stand back and look at it. Your eye will look at the flowers and mushrooms - not the cave - except that you're trying to find the entrance to the cave now because I told you your mind would look for anything light. But it's true. If you want to hide stuff - make it match the background or make it dark with bright around it.
Colors also give people feelings. Green and blue tend to calm you, while reds and oranges are exciting. Throwing a rainbow into something tends to put happy, warm, but excited thoughts into your brain. While gold usually means "rich", the gold default flooring does nothing for me. It's a kind of organic, mud colored gold. Patterns are important too, but that brings us to floors and walls.
In Furcadia, the floors, walls, and objects are stacked. Furcadia draws floors first, any walls are written over that, and then any objects are drawn over that. Floors and walls are basically backdrops while the items and furres in your dream tend to be the "stuff" dreams are made of. Since furres come in many colors, they tend to be the "exciting" bits in your dream. The fact that they talk and walk make them more exciting.
But the point is that floors are boring. Necessary, but boring. You can liven them up by dsing them to move, change, flash, clash, or crash - but they're still floors. Walls are good - but they don't change. They just sit - sort of like a floor. Boring - necessary - but booooring. That's why Furcadia has pictures and windows and things to put on your walls.In a minimalist house, there are floors, walls, and very little of anything else. Some people like that. In fact, some people pay a lot of money to make their house that way. It's easy to clean - but what are you going to talk about while you're having dinner?!
Nupe. I like STUFF. Lots of stuff. That 20 year old Mask of Moogle on the wall... the berry vine I found in the woods when I was almost eaten by a mad porcupine... That demon cup that will one day explode and kill life as we know it - all those THINGS are interesting. They all have stories - so at dinner, someone will say, "My what an interesting collection of rhino snot! Wherever did you find it all?" and then I can tell them the most luscious stories!
Most furres like stuff. The trouble is that some people think they need lots of different stuff and so they fill an entire patch before they've ever laid the first floor. That's not how it goes. Furcadia provides you with 624 default objects. Have you used all of those? Is there nothing in there that you can use at the moment? Can you put one object with another object, for example, and come up with a new object? If you put a statue with a shield - it looks like the statue is holding the shield - it looks like a new object, but it's not. If you tuck the default fruit trees just behind a wall - it looks like your wall has flowers along the top. Try messing with only the default objects - trying to combine them in new and various ways until you come up with something nifty - then note that and find more.
My favorite dream is a default patch dream. In it, they used the rock wall archway to make a wall of arches in a room. And then behind that, they put in objects to match so that it looked for all the world like it was a mirror. How clever!! Only you know what? You could ds that too - so that reflections in the mirror changed as the room changed. How cool is that? You sure won't see a patch object change. There were sooo many of these types of tricks in this dream, that I had to beg for a copy of it and still visit it when I want an inspiration. Imagination is the heart of dreams.
So you don't need lots of different stuff - you just need to use what you have wisely, and add a thing or two as wanted/needed - use a new object if there is no other way to get the effect. There is no reason for 1 megs worth of items. Not if you have any imagination at all. Before they had patches, people used to use blue colored puzzle pieces as waterfalls - they could ds them to "move". Before patches, people would make a fire "burn" by changing the floors beneath the fire object so it "looked" like it was burning when it wasn't- and you know - even with patches nowadays, it still looks fairly good.
Now with all of this in mind, there is also something called Soul. It's elusive, but all dreams are a window into someone's soul - like art is a window into an artist's soul. Your choices of color, your style of weaving - all of that is part of you. When you make a dream, make it how you like it. Look at colors and see if you like how they go together. Put your objects where you logically think they should go. Tie the rooms together with logical ins and outs - but build it with your own taste and style. Tell a story with your dream - your own story. And you will have a dream that is not only a treasure, but is also a piece of "you."
