I heart SmallWorlds

Me and virtual Evey (sporting a fetching pink cow-cat hat), chilling in my soon-to-be hedge maze.

After my friend Twittered about SmallWorlds the other day, I signed up for their open beta (a decision partly influenced by the girl in Bruce Lee/Kill Bill garb on the front page). It was already late at night when I got started, and I thought I’d sign up, pop in and play a few games, and hit the sack. Instead, I stayed up til 3 AM exploring the world, taking missions, forming teams to help other players complete their tasks and customizing my room.

I finished most of the introductory missions within a day, and there’s no way to earn more money*, but if there’s this much to suck me in during the beta phase, I am almost afraid to see what they’ll unleash as they add in new features. The FAQ promises that upon launch, “premium accounts will be available at a very small and reasonable monthly fee.” Luckily for me.

Customization
As a child, I had paper dolls, dollhouses and an extensive wardrobe for my Barbie, and I still love carefully arranging every detail on an avatar to make it just right. The SmallWorlds avatars have a decent range of face options (including two-toned hair, which I’ve seen well-utilized in-world), and the art is appealing. Walking around, the characters are almost bobble-headed, so facial details show up clearly, although mostly I play from a wide view, which shrinks everyone by about half.

Best of all, you also get to create a dance for your character (made by combining different limb and head positions), and characters get a just-as-customizable pet that follows them around everywhere and performs tricks. A nice touch – as my mission-completing pals and I joined each other in various rooms, our pets would sometimes run up to greet each other affectionately.

The houses are pretty good, too. It reminds me of Webkinz (the best part of which is decorating your little pet’s house), but it is much more refined. You can choose from a handful of different layouts and each room can be decorated differently, but there’s only a handful pre-set options for walls and floors with even fewer that actually coordinate, which I expect will get repetitive pretty quickly. For example, I named my house the Peach Pit and so chose pink walls, but the same wallpaper graces the Tea Room and the Antiques shop as well as countless other homes. I won’t be surprised at all if more options are introduced later on, but there you go.

Gameplay
Entering the world, the player is presented with several types of missions: gaming, socialization and arts. These serve as a way to get familiar with the world and its mechanics, and also provide experience points and tokens (the currency). However, the missions are actually kind of tough – waiting for a partner for a game of pool took ages, and getting through the game itself took even longer. One of the gamer track missions required a high score on a classic arcade game that took me several frustrating tries to achieve. And some of the socialization tasks mean you have to pop in and out of public areas begging for people to visit your house.

These aren’t bad points, though; the level of effort required will weed out the casually interested/quick abandoners, and hopefully most of the inevitable dipshits as well. (For a world with a totally open chat system, there are surprisingly few “LETS CYBER”-type messages so far.) Being forced to chat with people about missions helped me overcome my natural hermit-like reticence, and now I have a retinue of pals who are all willing to help move one another forward in the game. Plus, going through the painful steps myself has made me willing to help anyone who asks.

There were a couple of points where I seemed to have gotten ahead of myself, however. The arts mission suggests you start with a blank slate for a home, so I had to reset all the work I’d already done with my decor, and the same thing happened later with a socialization mission – I had to delete my beloved, carefully-crafted kitty Evey in order to make a dog named either “Bigglesworth” or “Smoggo”. As soon as I found someone in the Spa area to pet my version of that canine, I released him into the digital ether. Rest in peace, Bigglesworth. You looked pretty cute in your little red top hat, but nobody messes with my cat and lives to tell the tale.

*For now, there’s not much for me to do in the game world. My remaining two missions are to purchase a pool table (150 tokens) and to gather 10 (!) people in my house, all dancing, at some point during the weekend. Unfortunately, it’s Wednesday, and I’ve spent all my money and can’t earn more. According to the forums on the SmallWorlds site, currency earning is turned off for beta, and I just came across a new thread that offers some less-than-satisfactory (not just to me!) options for earning more.

But – when I Tweeted about the lack of currency being a blessing, at least in terms of saving me from playing until 3 AM for the second night in a row, I got a reply from co-founder Mitch Olson, asking for ideas. So there may be hope (or despair, depending on how much you value time for sleep).

In the end though, all of the time I spend nudging Persian rugs into place and planning a hedge maze for my garden will be for naught – the whole world will be reset when the game launches officially. I won’t let that stop me from jamming out in the Peach Pit this Saturday night with random people, though. There may not be any chairs left by the time I sell my belongings to afford that pool table, but no need to worry – I am keeping my cactus plants, no matter what. A girl’s got to have priorities.

The future
This interview says that the next release stage will be eight weeks from now, and will include widgets and game API stuff, and the following stage, while shrouded in mystery, seems to be about deeper customization. All my stuff will be deleted in August when the site launches officially, and I will be forced to re-build my empire from scratch – so you should visit me in the Peach Pit now by signing up for an account on SmallWorlds.com.

P.S. If you would like to help me out, give me your email address so I can invite you, as this supposedly yields a reward. Sorry, there’s no referrer entry space or link (yet).