Kickstarter

"So... What are Booshies?"
Booshies are fantastic elemental creatures that roam the world of Booshtopia before finding you, their human friends, who can help them reach their full potential. They breed, they battle, they help you craft and explore.  Once you start playing with Booshies, you won't want to stop!

Booshies as a concept began a couple years ago when Kal, the lead programmer, came to Rachel, the creative director, and said "So, you wanna make a game with critters?" to which she replied "Sounds good to me."

From that point on, Kal and Rachel have been working on what quickly grew to become their passion - a game within a game.  Booshies sets out to become Second Life's first and most advanced pet MMORPG.  They came up with the idea of having players breeding two species of creatures together to create completely new species.  Then they decided that wasn't enough -- they needed to battle!  They would battle each other and random monsters.  That brought up the need for an entire world to be created for players to explore forests, underwater caves, volcanic caverns and other awesome stuff that we can't reveal just yet.

What makes Booshies different?
When we first started working on Booshies, the breedable pet craze in Second Life had just barely begun.  We're nothing like all the other breedable pets out there... and more importantly, Booshies are much, much more! 

The first thing different about Booshies from what's currently out there is that Booshies, as a concept, is much more than a pet you breed.  It's a world of exploration, dungeons to conquer, bosses to defeat, characters to meet... We could go on and on about what all the world of Booshtopia will offer potential future Booshtopians but that would spoil the surprises!

With regards to the creatures themselves, while other breeding pets generally only have one species that you breed to find different colors or 'coats' of, Booshies have dozens of species that you can interbreed to find completely new species with!  Putting an Equylon and a Girecko together, for example, would produce something completely new!

We are quite literally creating a new world within a game, an MMORPG with pets.  There will be no end to the secrets to uncover and things to discover.

So where are Booshies now?  Where are they going?
Booshies as of this writing are in alpha and will always be under development, even after official release since the story is ever changing and always being written by our players.  We will be entering closed testing soon with open beta to follow shortly after.  Once beta testing is complete, we will enter into our official release stage in Second Life.

For the foreseeable future, our plans include creating 30 Second Life simulators full of explorable content for our players.  We aim to provide nearly endless game play and enormous replay value.  Along with the explorable world, the game will start with around 20-30 Booshie species and we will be adding new ones for players to find on a constant basis either by breeding or simply by chance while playing in Booshtopia.

In the distant future, our aim is quite high.  Our ambition is to make Booshies extremely accessible on multiple platforms including facebook, iphone and android apps, and our own standalone client and on our website.  We want to make it so you could be playing in Second Life one minute, have to leave and be able to jump onto your phone on the next and pick up right where you left off.  When you get back to Second Life, everything you did on your phone is right there as if you were playing in it all the time.  Same would go from any platform to the next since our servers will handle nearly all of the data.

What is Booshies' business model like?
We intend to use a proven standard business model known as 'Free to Play" which will allow our players to own, raise and breed their Booshies for free.  We will be making our money through premium content we offer players to add to their game; things like revitalizing your creatures when they are coming to the end of their lives to renew their 'life energy', expanding the total number of pets you can keep, upgrading their house, etc.  We will also offer basic pet food for sale, as well as seeds and other misc. items for people who do not wish to use the secondary market or are not interested in having to create food on their own and would rather pursue other avenues of the game.

Future revenue may also include upkeep for guild owned land in PvP environments of Booshtopia as well as player owned land (rentals) in the future of Booshies.

When can we expect Booshies to be released?
An all too frequent question and while we'd love to give you a concrete answer, we simply don't have one yet.  There are a lot of variables when it comes to making any sort of game.  This is our first 'breedable' project and it's being built from the ground up so there's bound to be some complications.  We're working hard to make sure we bring you the best possible game we can and we're putting quality before speed.  We hope you understand!

"So... why do you need my help?" you ask...
Creating any game is an expensive endeavor.  So far, the creators of Booshies have incurred all of the costs entirely out of pocket or with the help of a few extremely generous donators.

Some of our biggest expenses we already have and will continue to incur include...

• Server and PC Hardware
• Second Life Simulator set up and monthly costs
• Paying artists, scripters, coders, GMs, and CSRs
• Uploading files to Second Life
• Software Licenses
• Legal Protection & Application Fees
• Advertising
• Other random hurdles that decide to pop up

Everyone working on Booshies has no choice but to have second jobs right now because we simply cannot afford not to and in some cases unfortunately came close to not being able to afford to continue.  This delays what progress we can make on Booshies as well and needless to say, we all want to be able to dedicate ourselves full time to the project.

We'd also really, really, really like to start with more than just one sim in Second Life - not just because we'd be able to have way more stuff for you to explore but also to cater to as many people as possible.  Second Life simulators only run so well with 60+ people on them.  The more sims we have to start with, the easier we can cater to everyone, the better time you all can have.

With your help and the future community of Booshies, our team aims to put out something like no one's ever seen or done before.. but we can't do it without a leg up.  Help us and you won't regret it.  You'll be in Booshtopia in no time and never want to leave.

Please also know that our delivery dates for the rewards are sort of a worse-case scenario.  We certainly hope to delivery Booshies and all the rewards, especially the digital ones, well before hand.  We will also have a thank you page that will mention everyone who pledges to our kickstarter and wants to be mentioned.

On behalf of Kal, Rachel and everyone working as part of the Happy Chap Studio team, thank you for checking out our project (and hopefully backing it!)

To check out more of Booshies and what we've announced, be sure to check out our website http://www.booshies.com and our blog http://blog.booshies.com!