Creative Director Dave Werner looks back on his first video game project from 2002, a 3D VRML-based adventure called Second Nature World. If you like overly-complex controls and limited gameplay, you're in for a treat.---------------------------------- Transcript:Second Nature World was based on a comic strip I drew for our school newspaper in college. Using a program called Spazz3D, which let you create 3D objects using Virtual Reality Modeling Language, or VRML, I took the worlds and characters from the comic strip, and tried to convert them into 3D using simple polygons. You could actually play the game as most of these characters, each with their own special move. So you had Ashley's spinning flower attack, Stray the cat's Fire Truck of death, and a dozen more. Now granted, these special moves were just canned animations and did absolutely nothing other than usually crashing the game, but I guess they were technically moves and arguably special, so they made the final cut.Second Nature World consisted of 3 levels, each reachable by a central map screen. The so-called goal of each world was to find three hidden gold stars. That idea was based off the comic, where a star was always hidden somewhere in the panels of each strip. While searching for stars, you could talk to the other Second Nature characters, if by talk you mean trigger a repetitive sound file. All the voices were recorded by friends and faculty members through a crappy Radio Shack tape recorder that made everything sound like it was filtered through a giant bowl of Rice Krispies. There were also a few boss battles and secrets scattered throughout the levels as well to keep things halfway interesting.Level one is Avalanche Mountain, a winter environment filled with snowman characters, falling icicles, a snowboard ride, and 2 secret boss fights. The first one is triggered by clicking on an icicle with Pneumonia, an evil snowman from the comic, frozen inside. The icicle melts and Pneumonia expands to become the height of the mountain, proceeding to throw giant icicles at you. Now because VRML has no concept of damage, lives, or any sort of combat system - fights are a little anticlimactic. For this fight, you have to simply find and click on Pneumonia's weak spot - his upper-right tooth - to have him melt and finally stop projecting completely harmless polygons at you.The second boss fight gets a little more complex. Pneumonia's back, but this time he's got more icicles - and they can actually sort of hurt you this time. Each icicle has an invisible proximity box around it which triggers a script if touched, sending you back to the starting point with a little "OUCH" animation. This gets pretty frustrating really quickly. To beat Pneumonia this time, you have to click little sparks shooting between his fingers to reveal his heart, which then kills him with one final triumphant click.Level Two is based on the lawn from the University of Virginia, and has Thomas Jefferson's Rotunda as the main attraction. If you go behind the rotunda, you find a Mario item box which opens up the back wall to reveal the triforce from the Legend of Zelda series inside. Yeah, really, that's where the triforce is. Charlottesville, Virginia. Check it out. You run into most of the main comic characters here, including Cameron and Ashley, who are making updated appearances in Atmosphir. On the lower half of the lawn, your character automatically gets a frisbee, which you can throw by clicking. UVA has a significant secret society culture, the most famous of these being the 7 Society. So if you go underground beneath the Rotunda, there's a secret 7 society crypt there. Clicking the #7 flips open the dome while the columns form a ramp, which you can walk up to reveal former UVA basketball coach Pete Gillen.The UVA Lawn boss battle is an enormous angry flower, which shoots projectile thorns out as you slowly fly around and orbit its head. Clicking on small weak spots around his face eventually causes him to wilt.The treehouse, Level 3, is so big and so poorly compressed that you should consider yourself lucky if things run in double digit frames per second. Bridges and ladders connect several floors of characters, treetop villas, and even a small fish pond. A dog and a cat character get in a fight on the nearby Hadoken Plateau, with fan favorite Kabahushi the Ninja Grasshopper looking on. You can also take a tour of the level flying alongside a red bird, who soars in and out of the hollow tree.The boss is a giant Snake with a tail for a weak point, which is conveniently surrounded by fireballs. Clicking the tail enough times enlarges the snake, which you finally beat by running up its tongue and clicking a weak point inside its mouth.And by clicking on the lake on the main map screen, you can unlock a secret boss fight: an oversized red fish who shoots toxic bubbles your way. Clicking on the fish's pupils as he darts and splashes above and below water eventually finishes him off. I think it's clear I spent more time on animating the death scenes than anything else.Second Nature World took about a month to build, and launched online in March 2002. Despite all its technical flaws and shortcomings, frequent readers of the comic seemed to enjoy exploring the secrets and seeing the characters come to life. Back then I really had no idea I'd ever end up in video game development; it just seemed like a fun experiment. But you've got to start somewhere. For me, that somewhere was the aliased polygon landscape of Second Nature World.