BETA Week 2
I feel like every time I sit down to write one of these Everlife updates, I have to go back through my notes and remind myself what actually happened this week, because apparently I did a lot. :)
A big part of this week was continuing to respond to what I’m seeing from my BETA testers: some of them have already made it to Level 6, which means they’ve unlocked three-ingredient cooking and have started wanting more things to experiment with. Naturally, my response to that was: MAKE MORE FOOD.
There are now more than 150 recipes in Everlife, including a bunch of new three-ingredient recipes specifically so those higher-level BETA players have more combinations to discover. And speaking of food… we Have Fish! I’ve continued expanding Everlife Fishing, and there are now more than 200 regions across Second Life where rare catches are possible. I also added eight different Everlife specialty rare fish to find, but like always, I didn’t want catching a rare fish to just mean, “Yay! I caught a rare fish!”. I wanted them to actually do something, so those fish have started making their way into new recipes, too! Some of the new rare-fish recipes come with special meal perks giving players another reason to explore, fish, cook, and experiment with what they find. That little gameplay loop is becoming one of my favorite things about Everlife: Go somewhere then find something then bring it home then make something with it. That is very much what I want Everlife to feel like.
I also apparently decided that Everlife needed an entire tiny ecosystem this week. I finished off Everlife Flowers, which can now produce Pollen…..and, because pollen needs a purpose… I made Bees that use it. Bees will make Honey, which is how I intend to ‘sweeten’ recipes in Everlife cooking.
I also added a few more plants to the overall Everlife collection, including one that I have wanted for a while: COFFEE
Because obviously Everlife needed coffee.
I made a special seed giver for BETA testers, so testers don't have to spend L$ buying seeds just to help me test the farming systems. They can grab their testing seeds and go plant things, break things, breed things, and generally do all of the things I need them to do. I also added a way for me to quickly see the Favorite and Allergy assigned to new Everlife players.
When someone new joins, that information is sent to a private Discord channel. That gives me a really easy reference if someone needs help, but it has also turned into a surprisingly useful little “someone new just started playing Everlife!” notification….and I love seeing those come through. :)
The Documentation Monster Is Almost Defeated. One of the biggest things I learned from my first rounds of BETA testing was that Everlife needed better documentation, and it makes sense: there are a lot of systems now. Cooking. Farming. Animals. Fishing. Adventures. Friendly Locations. Collections. Moods. Ingredients. Physical items. Virtual items. I know how all of those things work because I've been staring at them for months, but a brand-new player does not.
That being said, I've been working my way through a series of Everlife How-To videos, and I'm now up to eight! I only have two left to make, which means I am dangerously close to being able to say that the initial Everlife tutorial series is DONE. It’s currently unlisted, but you can watch the whole playlist here as I continue adding them:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0yw3waGgA60&list=PLA5NOaYVBe-A
I added about 30 more region doubloons from Sansara and I fixed and completed the ‘City by the Bay’ Adventure; I’m super excited about this because it gives Everlife TWO completed Adventures, and one of them is through Bay City. :) Yay :)
I also fixed the recipe submission option in the Recipe Card Holder, which is something I really wanted working before Everlife gets into more people's hands. One of my hopes is that eventually I won't be the only person inventing ridiculous things to cook; players will be able to experiment with Everlife's ingredients, come up with recipe ideas of their own, and easily submit them for consideration. This adds more ‘flavor’, but it also shows that players care about contributing to theworld at large…and that’s a good thing.
There's been quite a bit of behind-the-scenes “this is becoming a real thing” work happening, too.
I created an Everlife Canny: https://everlife.canny.io/
This gives players a dedicated place to submit feedback and ideas instead of everything disappearing into Discord conversations, IMs, notecards, and whatever random place someone happened to tell me something.
I also re-boxed all of the Everlife plants and animals in preparation for eventually putting them in the in-world store and on the Second Life Marketplace. That felt like one of those deceptively small milestones that takes a ton of time. For over a year, I've been thinking almost entirely in terms of building a game. Now I'm starting to do some of the work involved in actually releasing one.
I created an Everlife Collaborator page that I can easily send to creators and brands I'd like to work with in the future, and this week, I applied to two creator Discord communities. I've already been accepted into one! I'm still waiting to hear from the bigger one organized for Salt Peppermint. I meet all of the listed qualifications (and then some), so fingers crossed that I hear something before the weekend.
I also accepted an invitation to a ‘game’ event in Second Life later this fall called “Playable In World”. I had an oppertunity to talk with the organizer, Eric Stuart, and we nerded out over game making a bit. It was really fun, and I’m already mulling on how I want to showcase Everlife during the convention. Check it out for more information: https://phoenixlabs-sl.com/playableinworld/
Oh. And I bought more land because apparently I wasn't busy enough. Unfortunatly the best neighbor in exsistance (and my mainland ‘partner in crime’) had to tier down their mainland holdings. :( I think Skyler is the MOST amazing builder, and we had sort of ‘taken over’ this mountain in Heterocera with beautiful trees and rocks for years, so naturally…when Skyler said she needed to let part of it go, I had to acquire part of Summit Pines and increase my tier by about 35,000 square meters.
I have a stupid amount of tier, actually. (That update will be in the monthly summary at the end of the month…cause holy moly. It hurts.)
But everything on Summit Pines? I deserves its own post because there is a much bigger plan behind it, and I don't want to bury that story halfway down an Everlife development update. So… more on that later. :)
In some ways, it's funny looking at this list because a lot of these things seem fairly small when I'm working on them individually. Add a fish. Make a recipe. Script a flower. Fix a button. Record a tutorial. Box a plant.
Then I look back at the end of the week and realize that Everlife now has more than 150 recipes, rare fishing across more than 200 regions, eight specialty fish, flowers producing pollen, bees using it, coffee growing, a feedback system, a nearly complete tutorial library, BETA tools, packaged products, and the beginnings of a creator collaboration program.
HECK YEAH, dude. :)
There are still things to fix, sure. There are still systems I want to improve before I open the doors wider, but we're getting there and increasingly, it feels less like I'm building all of the individual pieces of Everlife and more like I'm watching those pieces start to become a world.
