Naia Green-Community Center "Welcome to Furcadia!" is something you hear a lot in our independant MMOG or MMOSG (Massively Multiplayer Online Social Game), as we like to call it. Furcadia was first created by inovative game designer Dr. Cat and his business partner 'Manda in 1996, and is still growing and changing every year. Furcadia is free to play (we make the money to pay our small staff and run the game off sales of specialty avatars and items) and has a player base of over 60,000, more than half of whom are female. The "game" is not about fighting, killing or the treadmill like most online games. We are all about players creating cool stuff of their own, roleplaying characters and community! The Furcadian community is awesome and even has an extensive volunteer system with over 1,500 players involved. These volunteers, called Beekin Helpers, answer questions that other players have and help them learn how to make their own areas in the game. We allow anyone to create as many of their own spaces (We call them dreams) in the game as they want to and they can even add their own art, sounds, music and can use Dr.Cat's DragonSpeak scripting language to program things to do what they want! We made the decision to keep Furcadia in 2D with an isometric view so that players could more easily add their own art to the world. While our office is in Austin, Texas, our staff reflects our community with members from Finland, Germany, Taiwan and all over the world. Our entry, Naia Green, is Furcadia's Community Center dream. It's the newest map we've added to the world, it was an instant success and has been in use by players for almost a year now. We'd like to note that there are tools that make it so any player could make a dream just as complex as Naia and many do! This important social environment was created by Ben Jans, (3D animator, graphic artist, and head of dreamweaving) and Katie Bazor (Producer, community director, and volunteer coordinator) with a long list of art credits, including 'Manda (Art director, Vice President, and Roleplay designer). Naia Green was carefully designed to be a living part of our community. With thousands of players coming through it every day, Naia is designed to get them where they want to be and assist them in their play. The dream features a Help Center, Welcome Mat, Tech Desk and areas for all our volunteer groups to hang out and help furres with questions or just welcome them in. Our Furcadian Academy is located in this dream with places specifically scripted to make giving classes to the public easier. The Group Hall allows Groups and Guilds to have a special portal into their own dreams and a place to advertise and showcase them. There's also many social areas set up in the dream just to hang out and chat, including the Coffee House, Beekin Hangout and an underground bar, but one of the best social features is the FluFF Pit, which has special scripting to help you find someone to chat with. We've included a slide show with an overview of the map and all its many purposes with explanations for design decisions. You can open the attached zip file into a folder and run it in an internet browser window or go to http://www.furcadia.com/naia/dream_design.html to view online. This dream can be viewed live and in action by downloading the small client for free at Furcadia.com and pressing the "N" button on tab "B" to jump there. Entry submission is here. Kellie "Katie" Bazor (Emerald Flame in Furcadia)
		Furcadia - Welcome to Naia Green