If You Give a Feorie a Cookie... (aka Introducing Everlife)

Have you guys ever read If You Give a Mouse a Cookie? If you haven't, the premise is adorable: a little boy gives a mouse a cookie. Naturally, the mouse asks for a glass of milk. The milk leads to something else, which leads to something else, which leads to something else until, eventually, we somehow end up right back at the cookie.

I have been thinking about that book a lot lately, because apparently, if you give a Feorie a Bay City event idea, she will accidentally make an entire game. Whoops.

It Started With a Cookie

This whole thing started because I was tinkering with the guts of a game I made years ago called Forever Tourist. The Bay City Alliance mentioned doing a few more events throughout the year, and I've been part of Bay City long enough now that I've really wanted to create something for the city as a whole….something that gives people a reason to wander around, explore, discover things, and maybe visit parts of Bay City they've driven past a hundred times without ever actually stopping.

So, naturally, I started developing an idea for an event. (Stay tuned for the Bay City Film Festival!) But pretty quickly, I realized that if I wanted the event to be as interactive as I imagined it, my old Forever Tourist game wasn't going to cut it. I needed something new. If I wanted this delicious cookie, apparently I needed a glass of milk. 

That's how Everlife was born. And then things got a little out of hand.

Okay, But What Does It Need to DO?

The conversation in my head went something like this:

If I'm going to make a "thing" for the Bay City Film Festival, what does it need to do?

Well...it needs to tell people things. Make stuff glow. Maybe reveal clues. Give people collectibles. Like one of those convention games where you go around collecting stamps, like Dragon Con or Comic Con.

Ugh. Stamps. Do you really want to do stamps again?

Actually...no. But people do like collecting things.

Yeah, but they also like showing their collections to their friends. A stamp card doesn't really do that. What are some real-life things involving travel and collecting that aren't stamps and how can we show them to our friends?

Hmm. TJ does smooshed pennies. That's really cool, but I don't want to recreate what he's doing. We'd talked about geocaching before, though.

What if exploring somewhere gave you a coin? A little artifact? Some kind of souvenir that said: "I was here."

And there was the next glass of milk. Those little souvenirs eventually became Doubloons. Then Doubloons needed places to discover. Places needed Adventures. Adventures needed clues. Clues needed objects that could react differently depending on the person finding them, so then I needed Moods.

And suddenly I wasn't making a Film Festival game anymore. I was making Everlife.

What Is Everlife?

At its heart, Everlife is about gamifying exploration in Second Life; giving you reasons to go experience the grid in ways you haven’t before. 

You might follow an Adventure across several regions, discover a tiny location you've never seen before, collect a Region Doubloon, uncover a Memory, or find a hidden object because your player profile happens to be in the right Mood. Maybe you stumble across something that sends you somewhere completely unexpected.

Then I wanted it to be something you could keep playing and be a little different each time. That's where the next problem appeared. Once you've completed an Adventure...then what? I needed another cookie.

Plants and Animals and Cooking and Fishing...Oh My

We started building systems that could create variation between players and between play sessions. Plants. Animals. Cooking. Fishing.Player Moods. Different things you can collect, grow, cook, discover, trade, or use. Why? Because those systems make Adventures less predictable. Maybe a clue requires something you've grown or maybe something appears because you're Inspired. Maybe another player approaches the same Adventure differently because they've collected completely different things than you have.

The goal isn't really the ‘tomato’. The ‘tomato’ gives me another game-design lever I can pull to make the next adventure interesting. And that brought me back to something I've leaned on before with game design: Bartle's Player Types. I mean, if ‘ain’t broke, don’t fix it…right?’

ACHIEVER: Everlife is probably very Achiever-friendly. You can collect Region Doubloons. Find Memories. Complete Adventures. Earn XP. Level your character. Discover recipes. Chart regions nobody has submitted to Everlife before. There are numbers. There are collections. There are things that go ding. My Achievers are going to be fine.

EXPLORER: Everlife is also intentionally very Explorer-heavy. I watched how excited some of my friends became about the recent Dahlia Linden adventure, and I've always loved the old Magellan-style adventures that sent residents wandering off into strange corners of the grid. Second Life is enormous. There are thousands upon thousands of regions filled with things people have built, sometimes lovingly maintained for years, that most of us will never know exist.

If you have Explorer friends, you know a good clue, a fair puzzle, and something interesting waiting at the other end and they'll happily wander halfway across the grid looking for it. Especially if the prize is slightly more exciting than double-prim land. (Sorry, Lindens; just sayin'...)

SOCIALIZERS: Then I started thinking about the Socializers. What about the people who just want to find their people? I thought about my friend Luci Holiberry; she runs a club and hosts events. She doesn’t need campers or someone teleporting in, clicking an object, and immediately teleporting away. She wants people that ‘want to hang out with other people’.

People. People who are actually looking for somewhere to go and someone to talk to.

If you've spent any real amount of time in Second Life, you probably know that "finding your tribe" is one of the biggest hurdles here. It can be surprisingly difficult to find a place that matches your interests. Then, even when you do find one, how do you know when everyone is there? How do you know whether those people actually want strangers walking up and talking to them?

Second Life can put 100 avatars in a nightclub together and somehow still leave everybody wondering whether it would be weird to send someone an IM.  So I started wondering: what if Everlife could help with that, too? 

What if some locations could essentially raise their hand and say: "Hey. There are people here that are in a ‘Friendly’ mood. Come hang out."

So, naturally, that became another piece of Everlife, too. I didn’t want to just reward players for exploring places, but give them ways to discover communities, because the best collectible for those players isn't really a Doubloon; it’s friendships. 

It Sucked

There's another part of this story I haven't talked about much publicly yet. The industry I worked in was basically wiped out underneath me during the rise of AI. I’m not being a ‘hater’, I’m just being honest. For years, I worked in SaaS Customer Support, Education, Onboarding, Project Management; all of those strange jobs where you're half translator, half problem-solver, and occasionally the person calmly explaining why the giant red button should perhaps not have been pressed. And then…… suddenly that world changed.

If you know me, you know I'm a go-getter, and I live in one of the most expensive parts of the country, so I’ll do what I need to do to get my bills paid. In this case, it mean I spent about a year working in a field I'd never worked in before (Kitchen Manager of a large commercial kitchen). 

I spent a lot of time away from my family; it sucked a lot and I’m not going to lie…there's really no poetic way to phrase that. It sucked.

But during every little pocket of free time I could find, I worked on this weird little thing. This ‘everlife’.  I learned and experimented and broke things and then fixed things and then broke the fixes. I had ideas that turned into completely different ideas, but then slowly this "little game for an event" became something much, much bigger than I originally intended…… which brings me to something else I want to do differently with Everlife…..

For Business Nerds Like Me :)

I've been really inspired lately by businesses like Jersey Bird and the idea of being much more transparent about what happens behind the thing you're buying or using. I don't want Everlife to magically appear one morning as a shiny finished product while I pretend I emerged from a mysterious ‘game-development cave’ because that's not what happened. Everlife has been messy. It's been built through experiments, conversations, spreadsheets, LSL, databases, failed ideas, surprisingly good ideas, testing, rebuilding, and an absolutely unreasonable number of moments where I said: "Okay, but what if it could also..."

As Everlife moves into BETA and, hopefully, beyond it, I want to talk about that part too. I want to talk about why I make certain design decisions. I want to talk about what things cost. I want to talk about how partnerships work and where money goes. I want to talk about things I try that don't work. And when other creators are involved, I'll talk about those collaborations too, as openly as they're comfortable with me doing. I think that part might actually be interesting, and maybe useful to somebody else who's sitting in Second Life someday thinking: "What does it really feel like to run a Second Life business?”

Right now, we're standing on the brink of BETA. I'm reaching out to a handful of friends and veteran Second Life residents, asking them to try to break my game. And they will. Oh, they absolutely will. That’s good, because I want to know what happens when people explore all over the grid with it. I want to know which systems make sense and which ones only make sense because I've been staring at them for months. I want to know what's fun, what's annoying, what's confusing, and what's completely unnecessary.

I'm nervous, but I'm also ridiculously excited…I’m getting a lot closer to being able to host that Bay City Film Festival. :) Haha! Check out this TEASER VIDEO if you are interested in keeping up with the project! :)