Last week, MOP’s Chris took a look at My Time at Evershine, the latest multiplayer cozy game from Pathea Games, best known for My Time at Portia and My Time at Sandrock. Both of those games, plus Planet Explorers, were successfully funded on Kickstarter to propel them to launch, and now, Evershine is embarking on that same quest, as its Kickstarter officially began this morning and has already surged past its modest $200,000 goal.
In fact, as I’m typing this, I’m watching the number go up in chunks of a thousand every other minute or so, more than doubling its ask, so any number I put down is going to be outdated by the time this article is live – all a very good sign for the indie Chinese studio, which has noted that Sandrock alone cost $12M and expects “Evershine’s budget to be somewhere in the ballpark as well.”
Pathea is emphasizing a new art style, a focus on town management, and an improvement to multiplayer capabilities with the new game, which is why it’s bright on our radar.
“We didn’t feel like we completely delivered on the multiplayer aspect, we had to downsize the scope due to budget constraints; we made the game a bit too long so the ending dragged for some players; the house building and factory aspects were not too user friendly; some romanceable characters received much less attention than others; and so forth and so on,” Pathea says of its two earlier titles. “We’re gonna correct these.” Specifically, the team is promising that “multiplayer story co-op will be there on day one with up to four players.”
“A huge THANK YOU to each and every one of you! We’ve reached the goal of $200,000 in just 35 mins!” the team now has penciled in at the top of the Kickstarter page. Stretch goals run all the way up to $500,000 and include in-game cosmetics, flirting, bathtubs, romance interactions, and porting of characters from the earlier games into Evershine. The Kickstarter has a month to go – it’s one to keep an eye on.
