After much pulling out of hair and clawing out of eyeballs, I’ve settled on creating an island world. I avoided it for a long time because everyone and their dog is making an island world, and I wanted to do something different. Plus all my ideas were for an inland town. But CAW just wasn’t cooperating, and I didn’t want to retrofit Riverview. I wanted something new, something that is completely mine (ok, mostly mine).

So after some thought and playing and building and planning, I’ve come up with Plumbridge Island. It’s still in its embryonic stages but I thought I could share my trials and tribulations as I go.

My idea for Plumbridge came from research on Mackinac Island, which I plan on visiting this summer with my mom. I thought it’d be cool to design a Sim town where cars and trucks have been banned (not exactly sure how I’m going to work that yet, since I do want roads for bicycling) and most of the buildings are Victorian. Tourism will be a big deal on the island once it is developed, so it’ll have restaurants and shops, but much of the island will be designated as a national park, with woods, streams, and pathways for hiking.

To minimize CAW frustrations, and since I suck at terrain-sculpting, I picked one of the pre-made terrains (the Large Island one) and made a few (very few) modifications. I also did some spotty terrain-painting along the shoreline, which is the first time I’ve felt relaxed and calm while working in CAW. That’s when I knew I was doing the right thing.

I also took a break from sculpting and painting to build my first Plumbridge Island lot: Plum Point Lighthouse. It was inspired by the Round Island Lighthouse just off the coast of Mackinac. Since my Edit-in-Game feature of CAW doesn’t work (I’m probably just not patient enough to wait), I exported my world and built the lot in the actual game. Then I saved it to my library so I can plop it back in later on.

Right now the lighthouse is a residential lot and the home of my test sim, but eventually it’ll be a community lot, probably a museum. I plan on adding some rocks and some scrubby bushes back in CAW mode. I can’t wait for the Ambitions EP to come out, since it sounds like we’ll be able to add/move lots and deco around in-game. That’ll be AWESOME. Seriously, I could have kissed everyone at EA when I read that. Let’s hope it doesn’t turn out to be some lame thing where we can only move/add a limited number of objects/lots. *crosses fingers*

It was gratifying to build a part of my new island world — it’s like an anchor, something that will help keep me focused as I create the rest of the world. I still have a ton of work to do, but I feel like I’m FINALLY making some real progress.