Unia, the survival horror FPS game which launched last month in Second Life, has earned over 1000 players in its first 30 days, the developer team just told me. (You can even see them on Unia's leaderboard here.) Indeed, says team PR rep Kess Crytal, some players are finishing the game's story mission (10-12 hours total play time by her estimate), then continuing to play, so they can rack up more monster kills to boost their score. "We have one player who we estimate is playing an average of 10 hours per day."
1000 players in such a short time is extremely impressive for an SL-based game. (Remnants of Earth, the popular mini-MMO in SL featured on Kotaku recently, has about 1400-1700 players after running over a year.) That's a lot of people willing to endure the heads-up display setup hassle a game in Second Life requires. For that matter, developing a game within a larger online game platform has its own challenges -- in this case, over three dozens SLers were on the development team (credits on the bottom of this page), and they had to collaborate together online, working across multiple continents and time zones:
"The challenges have been immense...let alone the cost of development," Kess says. "Two full sims for two years while in development. Staff changes were challenging too, and of course pushing the boundaries of what can be done within SL... as you can see, there was a huge number of collaborators involved which all needed to be communicated, and their input managed too."
Unia uses minimal scripts to optimize frame rate, and employs the new experience keys to seamlessly transition players from one scene to another.
As for the game story, and the name of the game itself, there's some unique inspirations there:
"The inspiration for the game came from the narrative and story by Kiana Writer." (Harter Fall is the game's Creative Lead, Indigo Lucerne is the Lead Developer.) "Unia is the Finnish word for dreams (though players find out of another reason for the name Unia during the game) And the storyline and game is inspired by real life dreams and nightmares of Kiana's. The gameplay starts with the player finding themselves stuck in the town of Molimo where a number of people have disappeared recently. After a while they are kidnapped and have to solve clues and puzzles via a number of nightmare/ dreamscenes in order to escape and find out who is behind the horror."
I'm actually kind of afraid to play, but I will when I can get Bright Canopy working on my laptop. Meantime, I'd love to share some "Let's Play" videos of the game in action -- if you've seen any (or shot one yourself), please post a link in Comments!
Images courtesy Kess and the Unia team
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