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SmallWorlds Blog
Mission Accomplished
September 16th, 2008 - Darren Green

Getting a new release “out the door” always takes a lot of planning and hard work, especially when it’s a virtual world with hundreds of substantial new features and improvements. Powered by a gargantuan final push from the team, the latest evolution of SmallWorlds was kicked into life late last week, heralding in the realization of another step towards our vision for social gaming utopia.

The first of the new features to get our players excited, was the wearable and consumable items. Mysterio’s Curiosity Shop was buzzing with activity, as players experimented with spells, potions and projectiles, while others were weighing up the respective merits of angel wings, jetpacks and capes.



Of course, Spacies was also a hive of activity, as players checked out the hundreds of new Flash games available on a wide variety of new game arcade machines.

The most powerful of all the new features, Missions and Interactions, took a little longer to get going as they have to be built from scratch on the live system. All of our new “official” missions will be built with the same in-world tools as those available to our players. We are now starting to see more and more Missions appearing in the new Missions panel, and are expecting there to be dozens by the end of the first week.



This is the start of what we are calling User Generated Experiences - players creating fun, interesting and even educational experiences for other players. In the next few iterations of SmallWorlds, we will be enhancing and expanding the capabilities of these features, as well as adding supporting widgets and items. These will enable the players to create more variety, immersion and fun in their missions, adding to the rich tapestry of experiences within SmallWorlds.

The Missions and Interactions framework is just the beginning of a very rich User Generated Experience platform that we are building over the coming months. We really mean it we we say that our players will build their own worlds, many with new/emergent gameplay styles that have rarely been seen before, if ever. Of course, we and our business partners will be joining in on the world-building fun.

We hope you can join us too.