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:
