Click here to visit Bad Unicorn World, the new sim from Bhad Craven's Bad Unicorn, purveyor of zany items in Second Life -- and, I think, a promising new way of solving SL's first-time "what's the point of this world?" user experience problem.
Not just a visually cool sim, but as the trailer suggests, a whole fun theme park/party space, where you can play various goofy competitive games, win prizes, and get your name on the sim's giant leaderboard -- sorta Second Life meets Fall Guys. This is exactly the kind of thing SL needs, appealing both to new and returning users: an immediately fun social space with easy-to-play games, with enough challenges and goals to encourage return play. (Which thus encourages players to meet each other, go on other adventures together, etc. etc.)
There's early evidence that it's working:
Since launching last weekend, Bhad tells me, the sim's Mario-style coin collection game and leaderboard has amassed over 1200 unique players -- huge numbers for an SL sim, or for that matter, compared to new indie games on Steam. With well over 100,000 coins collected in under a week (by his count), that translates to roughly 10,000+ individual coin collecting play sessions.
"Even met a day one new user who found my store through the destination guide," Bhad tells me, surprised.
Bad Unicorn World was partly inspired after Linden Lab invited him, along with other select SL community content creators, to meet the company during the San Francisco-based Game Developer Conference in March:
Above: Mr. Craven views the latest numbers on his leaderboard
"I grew up in the 90s," Bhad tells me, explaining his early inspiration, "and video games were a huge part of my life. I wanted to create something unique, something I hadn’t really seen in SL before.
"I’d been playing with the idea for a little over a year, but after being invited to GDC by Linden Lab, I found their vision for Second Life really inspiring. They talked about updates and the direction Second Life is heading. Seeing how committed they still are to growing the platform really inspired me.
"That gave me the push I needed to finally bite the bullet and get my own sim."
And if like me you're thinking Bad Unicorn World should be submitted to Linden Lab's Creator Partnership Program, Bad Unicorn is way ahead of you there.
"They said there's over 300+ e-mails about stuff like this," he tells me, laughing, "I'm near the bottom of the pile."
Click here to visit Bad Unicorn World, where you may even see me coin collecting too.
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