An Update on What’s Happening and Happened

Hello everyone.

First of all, I wish to apologize to all of you for the way Booshies has turned out so far. We realize leaving our players in the dark with very few official updates has left you all guessing about what we're doing. It was never our or my intention for things to become the way they have. It is safe to say that we got in over our heads and much was promised that we could not deliver the way it should have been because of many challenges that came up during development. Many of these challenges could not be helped, as Second Life as a platform for what we want to do put many hurdles in our way that are extremely difficult to overcome.

The team behind Booshies had never done a breedable or a game of any sort before - this was our first shot at ever doing so and our first shot at doing anything to this scale. We tried our best and spent countless hours, days, weeks, even months without sleep to bring what we could out.

Booshies lacks in back end programming and without a programmer we're kind of stuck. There's only so much we can do without one. While we've been in search of one over the past couple months, we have yet to find someone who can do what is needed; that meshes with our team with the right attitude. It is with this that we unfortunately must put Booshies in a 'hiatus' state as far as development is concerned. We will continue to search for the right person to work with us to get Booshies back on track to where it -needs- to go.

Until we can find an appropriate programmer, Booshies will remain as they are now. None of your pets or items will go anywhere and if you still wish to, you'll be able to forage on the sims. If you'd prefer to put your pets in day care, they will stay there as they always have and continue to until you recall them. Unfortunately, we cannot add any new species or skins without a programmer so the game literally will remain as it is.

Thank you for your patience and understanding.

- Kalia

Feeshing is here!

Feeshing is our latest expansion to Booshies

...and it's finally arrived!

While we suffered some unfortunate delays, we're confident that through extensive testing via our Live Beta team that we have a great release ready for you & all your friends to enjoy.

As outlined in our preview blog post, our Feeshing mini game is a multiplayer activity that brings gathering to you, not requiring you to be at Booshtopian sims to play. Feeshing can be done on your own sim(s) by purchasing either a Feeshing Buoy or Feeshing Pond and placing it in your favorite spot - the Buoy's would be great for existing water locations, and the pond for a pre-decorated option.

For a limited period of time as an apology for our delay on releasing Feeshing, we're offering promo prices until Easter Day as outlined below!

• Large Feeshing Buoy can be purchased at a promo price of 2000, down from 3000 & enables feeshing within a 15m radius for 15 users.

• Normal Feeshing Buoy can be purchased at a promo price of 350, down from 600 & enables feeshing within a 15m radius for 3 users.

• Feeshing Pond can be purchased at a promo price of 250, down from 500 & enables feeshing within a 5m radius for 3 users.

Remember, these lower prices are only active until Easter Day, so hurry by!

Of course, you will also be able to fish in select water located on the scenic Booshtopia sim so that you definitely do not have to pay at all to play. Like the rest of our game, Feeshing can be an entirely free & enjoyable manner to play!

As well, all official Booshies sponsors will be receiving a Large buoy & special sponsors pond which will enable feeshing on their sims, so you'll have plenty of options.

Playing the Feeshing Mini-Game

 

Feeshing is extremely simple, buy based on reaction and 'skill' to help prevent the distinct problem of botting and cheaters that we all suffer through here in SL, while still providing a fun & easy manner to play for normal users!

All users will be able to acquire a free HUD & Feeshing rod which is the basis for your playing! Right now, these can be collected from the main Booshtopia sim, although we are looking at alternative manners for distribution for the future.

Your HUD is a separate non web based HUD, which means even our users who cannot see media on a prim are able to play!

Feeshing itself is fairly easy, even for the most inexperienced users - the jist of it is that after casting via clicking the "Cast" button, you click the "!!! Tug" button each time you see a black exclamation mark over the bobber. This will slowly progress your bobber across the HUD until it reaches the Goal on the right hand side - wherein it will announce what you caught, and your item will automatically be sent to your Booshies inventory.

The types of items you can receive ranges from new mystery box type items which can contain a variety of rare or common goods, every day crafting materials, foods, and more!

For our players who like the details, you'll also notice that your Feeshing rod changes looks when you need to "!!! Tug" as well, this adds an additional manner to visually see that you need to Tug. The appearance will make it seem as if something is pulling on your line, and your rod will bend.

To prevent simply spamming the tug button, if you click it too much at the wrong time, your cast will be lost & you'll have to start all over. This rule is fairly lenient, but because it is a game of quick reactions - you'll have to be paying attention while Feeshing with Booshies to have success.

You can start feeshing with or without bait. Each piece of bait will cost L$15 from an in-world bait vending station or 150B$ from One-Eye the Fisher Gremlin on the Booshlands portion of your in HUD Map. Either method will credit the bait item directly to your Booshies supply.

We do plan to introduce different bait in the future that changes your odds of rare or different catches and you'll be able to apply the bait via the Feeshing HUD, which is separate and an in-world HUD. Each piece of normal bait will last you a little more than an hour to increase your chances at rare catches. Please remember, bait is totally optional - so again, Feeshing can be done 100% free!

Are you ready to begin fishing? Stop by the Booshtopia sim to get started by grabbing a FREE package including the HUD & Feeshing Rod and checking out one of the many buoy's scattered around the Booshtopian sims.

New Types of Items!

 

Some of the new types of items you'll encounter not only in Feeshing, but in future updates is the "Mystery Box" mechanic, wherein opening a box will not necessarily contain a specific set of items such as in our Starter Kits - but a random item from a set pool of items. What type of great things can you find?...  The normal, like seeds, ores, or other common crafting goods... And also the elusive, like strange Pearlessences, never before seen eggs, rare gems,  and assorted other special items depending on the box and it's rarity!

Ready to try out these new fun "Mystery Box" style items? Check your mail! All Booshies users have been given one "Old Boot" which unlike other games... have a use in Booshtopia! Open it up and see what crazy things may have washed up inside of it, & keep your eyes and ears open for news about new types of boxes you can get in the future.

Grooming/Life Energy Restore Update

 

Another great change that while subtle, we feel adds to the longevity of your favorite pets is that when you take the care & time to groom them, they'll increase their Life Energy at the rate of 2 points per day, allowing you to do a full breeding again after 10 days. While this process is slow, it is also free & encourages users taking care of their pets by grooming which not only increases their happiness, but yields important resources for professions.

Thank you all again for your patience & understanding in our delays, and we hope you'll enjoy the Feeshing mini game of Booshies!

Feeshing: Coming very soon!

We know it's been a while since we've updated and we're sorry for the lack of updates. We've been hard at work on Feeshing and a few more updates we'll be adding to Booshies at the end of this week. Without further ado, here's what you can expect from Feeshing!

Feeshing can be done one of a few ways by our players. There will be several feeshing buoys placed throughout Booshtopia and Booshlands where players can go feeshing for free. We will also have feeshing ponds and buoys available for a small cost so you can feesh while at home with friends.

You can start feeshing with or without bait. Each piece of bait will cost L$15 from an in-world bait vending station or B150 from One-Eye the Fisher Gremlin. Either will credit the bait item directly to your Booshies supply. We do plan to introduce different bait in the future that changes your odds of rare or different catches and you'll be able to apply the bait via the Feeshing HUD, which is separate and an in-world HUD. Each piece of normal bait will last you a little more than an hour to increase your chances at rare catches.

Be within casting distance of a pond or buoy and click cast to begin. The bobble will appear on your HUD. Soon after, you'll either be told you didn't get a bite or an exclamation point (!) will appear over the bobble on your HUD and your feeshing rod, if you are wearing it, will flex to show you something is on the line! Quickly click "!!! Tug" on your HUD before it gets away. Every possible catch has a different amount of tugs you must successfully click before you catch the feesh or whatever happens to be on the line. If you catch something, the pond or buoy will let you know and it'll appear in your Booshies supply. Be sure that you have room or you won't be able to keep your catch!

We have a few more exciting tidbits that'll be going in with feeshing but we'll save those for later this week as we get closer to updating.

We hope you'll give feeshing a try and look forward to seeing you all in Booshtopia soon!

Huntress Q&A Transcript

We wanted to thank everyone who attended our Q&A at Huntress Breedables this past week. For those of you who were unable to attend, we are happy to now provide this slightly belated transcript for you!

 

Short introduction to get it out of the way; I'm sure you all know Kalia, the founder and creative director. I'm Code/Matt, the lead developer on Booshies, and Faron who is another one of our devs with a specialty in security. Anke, our lead CSR, is also here.
This is our first post-release Q&A. I'm sure you'll all agree it's not been the smoothest ride in the world and there have been a lot of growing pains, but we are about to hit 1500 users next week, we have tens of thousands of pets that have been born, and we're seeing a LOT of support for Booshies so far.
We've basically now calmed down a bit from the post-release scrabble and we're hitting our stride with our major expansion packs that are planned to be released throughout the year.
We have a pretty long term plan and we can tell you in general what's happening and where we're going. We can't give exact dates for anything, But so far we haven't had to delay a single release so hopefully we'll keep with that trend and deliver new content fairly quickly.
In the short term we have the fishing update coming up, then after that our first major expansion which will bring in Combat mechanics, and then from continue fleshing things out from there.

Q. - What are the advantages going to be with fishing? (The new fishing mini-game soon to be released)
A. - Fishing Advantages; we hope to allow people to be able to gather food to feed their booshies for free, without having to roam the Booshtopia sims if they don't want to. The fishing system lets people do this, as well as adds another way for people to get rarer items and compete.  There will be items only available via fishing.
Anke Sillyfish: The fishing system is done through a separate HUD in SL, not a web-prim based one. We plan to have one available for online only play in the future, as it has the backend set up for it already.

Q. - So are we looking at weeks or months for fishing?
A. - The fishing system is not out yet, nor do we have an official release date that I am aware of yet.

Q. - Is there a video tutorial for Booshies?
A. - Video tutorials are available at http://www.youtube.com/user/booshiesteam

Q. - I'd like to know why the Light and Dark pools have such a high rate of return of no Fawneuas or Ichiboras when you sacrifice, plus I hardly get any hearts!!
A. - The sacrifice pools actually have a relatively low rate of return, you must have gotten fairly lucky most of our players we see don't encounter it very often.

Q. I want to know why as a breeder...I should invest in Booshies...perhaps someone with them can enlighten me
A. - Why you should invest in Booshies...Booshies, from our point of view isn't a product. It's a service. We're hoping to go beyond pure SL, and LSL to provide an entire immersive world. We hope to be more than a breedable, we want to be a real, proper, immersive game with a community surrounding it.
A lot of other breedables are basically spreadsheets with a very thin layer of interactivity on top of it. We want Booshies to be a complete framework for building a community and a world. You can breed and play with Booshies without even loading up SL, by using a normal web browser. We have an in-game economy with our own virtual items, our own virtual currency, and because we are a web-based system, we can really go places, like phones or tablets.
We market ourselves as a game more than a breedable in part due to the fact that many of our users play it entirely free, something which is often NOT an option from other breedables. By exploring the sim, almost all of our items and food are gathered by our users, and sold through a user controlled economy.

Q. - So in the future will we be able to turn Booshbucks into cash?
A. -  Booshbucks into cash is a bit tricky with a lot of ramifications to think about. We definitely want to do it eventually, but not until we feel completely comfortable we'll be able to support everything that comes out of doing that. At the moment, we generally advise that players trade pets in-world for money, and buy Booshbucks as their "upkeep investment" into breeding and playing to let them produce those pets.
It's important we have our own virtual currency (Booshbucks) right from the start so that we can eventually expand to other platforms such as phones.

Q. - Will you be able to gather resources via the web at all or will it be solo though sl?
A. - At the moment there are a few ways to gather resources via the web. Either indirectly via the trading houses, or through events such as grooming, farming, etc. We're looking into have a lot more ways to integrate gathering into the web HUDitself, for example eventually the fishing system will be able to be played via the web as well as in-world, and a few more ways which we're keeping secret right now.
We want to foster a good secondary economy between players so we look to encourage that players main source of food will be from purchasing from farmers.

Q. - Is it planned that also eggs can be sold in-world ?
A. - eggs sold in-world: it's an interesting question. It's part of our core game mechanics to keep eggs somewhat mysterious, you don't know what you're going to get from it until after it's hatched, and we don't want players to be able to be ripped off by buying an egg they don't know anything about. We could tie a view of the parents into it so that you at least have some view of what the resulting pet from the egg will be like, but I'd imagine a lot of players will still feel that Egg sales allows for a lot of bad behavior. So it's one for the feedback pile, but we're not developing it at this time.

Q. - Are you going to introduce a way to reliable get certain skins? Like through breeding or a pearlessence equivalent?
A. - It's important to remember that in a virtual world, the value of a pet can only be it's "opportunity cost" - the cost in time and personal resources to acquire it. We want to make sure that rare skins stay valuable, and unfortunately, the only way to do that, is to keep them rare and harder to get. We also have to balance our gameplay between the casual players, and the breeder farms. Coming up with mechanics that work for both is...challenging to say the least. We're hoping the value of pets will increase dramatically after we release the large combat update. It's a very fair observation to say we haven't yet got all the interactivity into pets that we want. As in the intro; we think of Booshies is a service that we're developing rather than a single one-time product. We want to get what we do have now, out to players to enjoy.  For those players that don't want to indulge in combat we also have some things coming their way which they should enjoy.
Not just combat armor or weapons, but I'd imagine pearlessences will become more and more relevant too, with elementals playing a bigger role in how a pet attacks or what they can do.

Q. - When will combat and the guilds be arriving?
A. - Combat will be arriving early next month. Guilds shortly after in our large "social" update we're developing after combat.

Q.- Could we get deco-eggs with horns or wings as buyable inworld gifts for eastern ? that would be so sweet )
A. - The problem with that... and I think you might find it silly... it's a problem we had on release: New users very often think those are valid Booshies eggs, and get upset when we tell them they cannot hatch actual pets from them.

Regarding the market:
It's a long, hard job balancing what makes what, how things sell. We experienced a number of issues in beta with listing being free to start. They are solidly the biggest reason people need to cash into the game and what pays us for it. What's more; people were using the free listing to flood the market and circumvent the inventory limit. It's a tricky situation that we'll be investigating as we go, same for balancing existing and new blueprints and recipes.
However what we are looking into is providing sellers with much more information than they currently have, so that they can see what players are buying and selling, so that they can make more informed decisions about what to put up for sale based on the current needs of the market
A "huge" listing fee is 2.5% of whatever you're posting it as. It's really not "huge"... and at a profit or at a loss is respective to each user, what some users consider profitable, may be what other users consider at loss. What users price their items at is not something I can control.
We removed the incentive for (single-item listing) behavior because it's now no different selling one of an item or 50, the listing fee stays linear with it. It does look like players still want to operate that way which is unfortunate, but we're going to have to find some way to combat this that isn't an additional restriction on the player. If you have any ideas or feedback on the issue we'd love to hear it
Our updated trade page with better sorting and searching will also help with that when released.

Q. - Is there any chance of getting stacks amounts raised, such as shining scales, doughliflower seeds, sand, etc.?
A. -  For some of those things, there's certainly a chance. We'll see about going over the stack limit numbers for the next update.
We look into the stack amounts continuously to check for any imbalance issues. We'll add the items you've named to our list to be reviewed.

Q. - I find the Booshies life is a bit short... after breeding a week mine wander all in the pools hehe... wouldn’t it better to let step down their live only 10% for a breed then 20% ...then we could keep them longer ...
A. - The issue with that is that it has the potential to further devalue the pets. Trust me, we've discussed it internally extensively - as it is if each pet pairs are making so many offspring, the market will devalue even further for them.
This is actually a great question because we do have a small announcement. From the fishing update onwards, grooming your pets will, for free, replenish a small amount of life energy. This means your pets will last far longer without having to purchase potions. We're hoping this will both let pets stick around longer, and encourage players to keep logging in to care for their pets each day to get the rewards for doing so.
It will take a few days to get a pet back to breeding-capability, but we think this is a good trade-off. Players with some spare cash can purchase life potions, or for those that don't want to put as much money into the game, grooming will get them there, just a bit slower.

Q. - Is it possible to have an invisible home portal or maybe some with themes?
A. - I think we were hoping to have more options for those in the future - when, I cannot say... but I think it's something we eventually hope to be able to provide.
Some other announcements on that aspect, though -- we're currently looking into implementing a new ticket style system that will be easier for our users to access and our team to keep track of in the upcoming weeks. We'll be using this as our major portal for support.

The simple truth is this is not something we can make perfect overnight, if ever. We're trying as hard as we can to make this a game people can enjoy and work together to have fun with. We won't be able to please everyone, since everyone's needs are different and people are trying to find short cuts all the time. But we ARE trying and constantly trying to improve what we provide.

Booshies Group Gift February – Ichibora Booshitar

To keep with the theme of our latest update, this month's free gift is a Booshitar of one of the newly released species - Ichibora.

We have also set out Kitling booshitars in elementless, flora, ignis and aqua for sale at L$250 per element.

Click here to visit Booshtopia and get your free Ichibora Booshitar just for being in the group!

Home Portal Pets and Spawning Items

One other small update we also made with the new home portals that we think players will enjoy is that your pets can now randomly find and dig up items that spawn from your home portal. It won't happen very often but they work just like the items you'd find in Booshtopia - click and you'll get them in your supply.

When and if your pet finds something, your home portal will let you know with the message "Your pet has fount something interesting..." and you will have 5 minutes to find the item and click it before it disappears.

On another small note... we have scaled back the negative effects of the light and dark pools since last night. We also apologize for the minor delay in the use of pedestals new and old following the launch. Thanks for hanging in there with us as we continue to work and improve Booshies for our players.

Dawn & Dusk

Tonight we are launching the Dawn & Dusk update to the Booshies server. This introduces a massive amount of changes and new content to Booshies so we hope you'll take the time to read through this blog so that you know what to expect and how things work!

Click to read more of this blog for all the details regarding the Dawn & Dusk update content.

Dawn & Dusk Coming Soon!

The time is upon us for the next expansion to Booshies - the Dawn and Dusk expansion. This major update brings with it many, many exciting additions to Booshies...

So we decided to tease you a bit by showing you some of the exciting new content, and let you take a guess at what some of it is!

Synthesizers will enjoy being able to make a variety of new items for use in nests, and for trading to their fellow players who practice in concoctions.

Concoctionists will be cooking up some fantastic new tasty dishes,
many of which are feesh-themed. (This is a hint!)

We'll also be opening our second sim and with it, among the other things on it, will be seven new spawning items: two new seeds and five edible ingredients.

And of course... the highly anticipated light and dark elementals will be within your grasp at long last! While Seraphi'ia and Noxet can't be on the land of Booshtopia due to their duties they are charged with, they have pools of their divine power that connect directly to their realms in the Booshlands where Booshtopians can sacrifice their pets to gain favor of them, and ask for a blessing once per day.

You'll want to make sure your pets love you lots, for a pet that has a strong love for their owner will surely be looked upon more favorably by the greater gods of Booshtopia.

Several new species will also be appearing in Booshtopia...
What could they be? How can they be found?

While we know you're probably impatient to start playing with these updates and finding all the new stuff, we ask that you be patient while we update the server in the coming days with the changes.

Booshies One Month Anniversary (and another gift!)

Today we celebrate our one month anniversary! Although we are hard at work on the soon-to-be-released Dusk and Dawn update, we wanted to give a short status report of Booshies as it currently stands, our current endeavours, and take a misty-eyed glance at how far we've come.