Everlife is alive!
Everlife is live!....Which is a very weird sentence to type after spending so much time building this thing. :)
The last few weeks have mostly been a whirlwind of finishing the BETA, fixing all the weird little things people managed to break, getting everything ready to open, and then immediately realizing that opening Everlife doesn't actually mean I'm done with Everlife,,,,it just means I've entered the next phase.
I've heavily utilized the Canny over the last few weeks, and it's actually been really helpful for keeping track of what I need to do, what I'm working on, and what I want people to be able to see me doing. I've tried to be pretty honest about...well...everything I'm doing.
Part of that is because if anyone is ever interested in why I made a particular decision with Everlife, I want there to be some record of what went into it. What broke? What did somebody suggest? What sounded like a good idea and turned out to be terrible? What did we change after actually watching people play? My notes aren't always great. I've basically been using Canny like a public version of Asana at this point, but honestly, if that's what it turns into, I'm okay with that. You can see all the things here:
I also busted out one of my old RP avatars and turned her into an Everlife CS bot. She mostly hangs out at the Antique Store, keeps an eye on Group Chat, and gives me another way to help people without having Feorie standing around there 24/7.
I actually paid for all the stuff to do this through SmartBots, but I could never get everything to sync up quite the way I wanted it to....so, for now, I went digging through the ancient history of Second Life and found Radegast.
Yes. Radegast. From "back in the day." :)
It's a super lightweight text-based viewer, and I've got it controlling my CS avatar right now. So far it has been REALLY awesome for this particular use case, but if there is a Linden somewhere reading this: you guys should make something like this.
Seriously.
A modern, lightweight, official text-based Second Life app that business owners could keep on their phones for group chat, IMs, customer service, notices, etc. would be AMAZING. Especially if you're trying to make things easier for people running businesses in Second Life. Just saying. :)
The last part of the BETA test was a whirlwind. TJ Hooker was an epic baddie and made me a grocery bag (isn’t it so cute?!) and Sheree Honeyflower turned into an absolutely epic fisherwoman and chef. She methodically worked her way through different plants, cooked recipe after recipe, and then took all of the Gross Meals she produced and used them to test fishing.
Which, somehow, was a perfectly reasonable Everlife testing strategy because it worked! :)
Meanwhile, I spent a LOT of time following behind her fixing things. There was an issue where XP wasn't being applied correctly. Then something was sending Corn when it wasn't supposed to. Breeding stopped working for cows at one point and that became a whole thing. There were lots of those little "this works perfectly until an actual human being does something I didn't expect" moments, but that's exactly why we did the BETA.
Along the way, I also cleaned up and streamlined quite a few things that weren't necessarily broken, but didn't make as much sense as they could. My goal wasn't just to get Everlife technically working; I wanted the whole experience to make more sense and, most importantly, be more fun.
I think we got there.
I had a little fangirl moment yesterday when Uota Noel came to look at the store. I follow Uota on X and he's one of my favorite Second Life explorers. He takes fantastic pictures and always seems to be wandering around somewhere interesting. Then he said something along the lines of: "It's going to take me some time to figure out Everlife."
And my immediate reaction was: OH CRAP.
Why? Because I remembered a lesson I learned almost instantly with the last version of Forever Tourist: the Japanese community in Second Life LOVES to explore and not alot is written in Japanese.
The language barrier can be really rough. Automatic translators can make things messy, and I suddenly realized that this was something I needed to deal with now, before I was 50 Adventures deep and staring at a translation project so enormous that I wanted to crawl under my desk.
So...I went on a translating spree and it actually turned into a really fun little revamp. Mixing English and Japanese on the same graphics without making everything look completely ridiculous was a challenge, but I went through every sign and every INFO token in the entire Everlife store and updated them.
I also translated all of my video scripts and turned them into notecards in both English and Japanese. That actually lined up with some feedback I got on the forums; that they would rather read instructions for a game than sit through a video explaining it.
Fair enough! So getting written instructions into the store suddenly moved way up my priority list.
I went one step further, though. I translated the two Adventures I currently have available in English and created Japanese versions of those as well. That means Japanese-speaking players can now actually play an Everlife Adventure in Japanese instead of trying to push all of the clues and story text through a translator.
Now I'm just hoping my translations don't accidentally tell somebody to make babies with a chicken at the lighthouse or something. :)
Seriously, I'm really excited about this and I'm REALLY glad I figured out that I needed to solve this problem now instead of a year from now.
Cranston and I have also been steadily working away on Summit Pines. A big part of what we're doing right now is trying to preserve as much of the existing landscape as possible while weaving a road through the edges and down the side of the mountain.
I'm a big believer in "realism" when I build; not necessarily actual realism because I know this is Second Life, after all.... but I want things to look like they belong where they are.
Now that Cranston has the road laid out, I'm going back through and adding rocks around the edges so it looks like the road was actually carved out of the mountain instead of being a road that is...you know...floating in space.
Cranston and I are also trying to settle on a firmer overall theme for the area. I haven't decided exactly what that theme is yet, but we'll get there.
I really thought I was going to squeeze in a spooky drive for Halloween, but I don't think that's going to happen. At least, I don't think I can build the version I actually want to build and turn it into a proper Adventure before Halloween without rushing it.
So instead of doing that, I'm going to save those ideas for next year. That gives me plenty of time to actually build the spooky thing I have in my head instead of throwing something together just because October happens to be happening. Instead, I'm going to start working toward something holiday-themed for later this year. That gives me enough time to prep it properly and, eventually, do both.
Now that the core Everlife system is done and we're actually LIVE, I can finally start shifting some serious attention back toward the Bay City Film Festival. I need to talk to Marianne and confirm what dates make the most sense, because once I start this thing, my plan is for it to become an annual Bay City event. So now comes the fun part: dates, planning, logistics, spaces, programming and figuring out exactly how all of the pieces fit together. I've been sitting on a LOT of ideas for this one, so I'm excited to finally start doing something with them.
I also need to start pulling together the details for the first proper Everlife update video. Originally, I thought I would publish the first one on October 1st but then I realized that my October 1st video would basically be: "WE OPENED!" which is exciting!
But it doesn't tell us very much. :)
Instead, I'm going to spend October figuring out the foundation for how I want these videos to work and aim for the first real one on November 1st. That way I'll actually have something interesting to talk about. How many people played? What did people do? What did they cook? Where did they explore? What broke? What surprised me? What did players completely ignore that I spent 47 hours building? You know. The important stuff. :)
It'll give me a chance to look back at the first full month of Everlife and talk about what actually happened instead of what I thought was going to happen.
For the moment, I'm carefully watching everything as we trudge into our first week of live play. I'll keep fixing things as people find them and I'll continue converting Adventures into Japanese. I'll keep improving the documentation and I'll start working on the new Adventures and other things I already have planned for later this year.
But there is something kind of wonderful about reaching this point. For months, Everlife has been a thing I was building. Now people can actually go play it.
They can grow things. Cook things. Fish. Explore Second Life. Collect Doubloons. Play Adventures. Find places they've never seen before and, hopefully, occasionally wonder what on earth I was thinking when I made something.
Everlife is a game of creation and exploration and now, finally, I get to see what happens when I stop being the only one creating and exploring it.
So far, so good! :)
