When we started planning My Time at Portia back in the summer of 2015, no one on that team thought we’d be here today with the third installment a decade later. The series has grown a lot. Back then the initial team was around 10 people, and we had just one goal: to make a charming cozy simulation rpg that had a great story and many charming characters. Today, the Evershine team is approaching 80 members, and our goal remains the same, just grander and carrying the expectations of a lot more people.
As Sandrock was in its height of development, a publisher approached us about making a mobile game based in the My Time universe. We thought it was a great opportunity to expand the IP beyond our regular audience, so we agreed. And thus, Project ME was born. It stood for My Time in the Eufaula and it was about developing the northern part of the desert further after Sandrock. We had developed many concepts for this mobile game during its development, but unfortunately, the publisher had a strategic change of direction and they dropped out. At the time, Sandrock was wrapping up and we thought we could use some of the lore ideas from Project ME in the next mainline. Of course, because a mainline needs to be designed as a single playthrough, we pretty much started from scratch. That’s how My Time at Evershine came to be.
This time, the core is still an open world RPG, but the player is the Governor of a fledging settlement instead of the Builder. With great power comes great responsibility. The player can recruit and assign settlers to different roles and assignments, including followers. At the same time, you’ll be responsible for their wellbeing. Angry workers are not conducive to a good settlement. We’re still tweaking how the story and settlement mechanics balance out, but the RPG part is the priority. There is just something fundamentally romantic about setting up a colony far away from civilization. The theme of this game is that no matter where people are from or what happened in their past, everyone comes together to make a new home that belongs to them. Feel that positive energy this series is known for!
We’re currently just past pre-production, but due to our experience, we expect less sand traps along the way. There were several important design decisions that we made when we first started production. First, the main story will be about Portia length: pour all the resources to make it epic, make it tight, without a mandatory third act. Second, because of the recruitment structure, we’re able to widen the breadth of NPC stories so that depending on who you have in your settlement, you might get different sidequests (mainline NPCs and story arcs are set in stone, so everyone gets them, you can’t kick ‘em out, sorry). Third, the single player story comes with CO-OP out of the box. This one was important, we knew we screwed up for Sandrock, so it was high priority to get it right for this game. Finally, we want to tighten the overall game, more priority on the important systems. Both Portia and Sandrock suffered a bit from expansionitis, we tried to solve issues by adding more, but this caused the games to became bloated. We had way too many mechanics and min-games that not a lot of players actually needed, so we’ll seriously keep that in mind this time.
Over the next days, we’ll deep dive into some of the topics we touched upon in this article. We think this is shaping up to be a unique experience that’s worthy of the My Time name. We hope you join us for the ride!
Important Reminder
Only 7 days remain for our Kickstarter! Reaching $2.5M means we will not do an Early Access on Steam (instead just focus on making the game awesome), unlocking exclusive items for your journey, and stretch goals like the Expanded Wardrobe, Rival Romance and another additional romanceable character. Your support helps shape the game and unlock special rewards exclusive to Kickstarter. We're incredibly grateful for everything so far, and sharing the love can help us unlock even more together!!
