Excluding the hours I spent harassing people on the Neoboards (le epic trolling xDD o_O) and being too incompetent for Gaia, Furcadia was my first real experience with talking to strangers on the internet, and I'm honestly still not sure how I discovered it. Are you keeping up with the timeline so far? I was unsupervised on the internet way too young! Still, I think I look back on my days on Furcadia most fondly, the creativity of its userbase was really unparalleled, and, this wasn't unusual yet at the time, but it provided a lot of annonymity and didn't ask anything of you either. Just pop into one of the hundreds of user-made games, known as "Dreams", and have fun!
While Furcadia is undeniably a furry game made for furries, mostly by furries, the userbase was diverse enough that it really didn't matter how interested you were in anthropomorphic animals. But the Redwall aesthetic was approachable, I was still really into pixel art at the time, and, like most children, I did not mind pretending to be a cat. In fact, I'm not sure if Warriors or Furcadia came first for me, but they are almost concurrent in my memories. I spent a lot of times in Warriors RP dreams, not doing much roleplay at all. I got banned from the big one because I kept sneaking out of the only area my character was allowed to be in. "You have to be in-character at all times!!!!" Yeah ok whatever. I was far more interested in exploring the map and seeing how the dream maker adapted and reinterpreted the ideas from the books.
But maybe it's because I never went to the 18+ areas, but it seemed like most people were just interested in mindlessly chatting with their friends. I didn't even learn the term "fursona" until much later. I really never associated with furries much at all, and spent most of my time with the horse girls (who of course wanted other people to be the horses, but they obliged to letting me be a cat). We eventually got bored of that sort of thing though and probably spent way more time in build-a-home dreams, which was just pixel art interior decorating. Some of them had pretty robust home renting systems, and one Pokemon-themed one in particular made you earn money by catching Pokemon. There were lots of dreams we'd hang out in to see what kind of trouble we could get into (not much but we tried).
Screenshots
Some of these screenshots are from friends, but this is a pretty good summary of my Furcadia experience!
Dreams
I eventually started making my own Warriors-inspired maps. That got boring very quickly and I realized I just wanted to code some funny or delightful experiences for people to stumble into, the sort of thing I always looked for when I visited dreams.
One of these projects was Desuland. It was a half-satirical, half-earnest kind of build-a-home dream inspired by the anime tropes that DeviantArt was fond of at the time. It ended up being when I imagined an anime convention was like, but as a whole town. There was a neighborhood with houses for users to rent using nekobucks, a school, a maid cafe, a night club, a library full of nonsensical lore for the map. I made avatars so that everyone could be a seifuku-wearing schoolgirl. I think I even coded time and weather. I don't have much of Desuland anymore, but most of the items were "borrowed" from pixel art dress up games, and my own were poorly drawn. My jokes were not very funny either so it's not too much of a loss!
Another project was Do Not Enter. There were two versions of DNE, the first was built around the same time as Desuland. This one was a continuation of a map that one of my friends never really completed, it was a sort of hospital in the clouds. The player was greated by a shower of confetti and a receptionist desk upon entering the dream. I liked that idea, so I did the same thing. It devolved from there. Instead of rooms for patients, there was a room with giant cupcakes, a room with a rainbow unicorn that would fart on the player once they were tricked into saying a magic word, a room for the unicorn's wife (a regular cow), and a few others that I can't remember. This was a simple dream where I just tried ideas just to see if I could, usually upon someone's request. My favorite thing was creating inconspicuous food items that would impart some undesireable effect on the player after consuming them. For example, marshmallows would trap the player on the tile. There was also a stack of napkins that the player could run over, turning them into a pile of napkins. The dream would scream at the player until the napkins were restacked.
For the second DNE, like the first, I kept the confetti at the enterance, and the setting was still in the clouds. But I was also more mature and by now much better at pixel art, so no more fart jokes. Like Desuland, I created a town populated by humans wearing a uniform. This time it was rabbit hats. Instead of a receptionist desk at the front, NPCs would entertain the player and give hints about all of the fun surprises, instead of of the dream owner (me). Bascially I gave my job to a robot. I think had plans to incorporate a currency system and home ownership as in Desuland, too. Despite the new DNE looking much better (though it still featured quite a few pieces of "borrowed" pixel art), there was significantly less stuff to do, and I was busy with school and other things. It's almost too bad I will never feel compelled to go back and do it properly.
