Papermint

January 21, 2010 – London, UK

Avaloop, a small independent game company based in east London and Vienna, is happy to announce the UK launch of their first game, “Papermint“.

www.papermint.com

Papermint is Cute, Social and Fun!

Papermint is a new social networking game which is set within an original, illustrated 3D virtual world. It was designed to appeal particularly to females aged 15 to 35, but it's good fun for everyone: if you're creative, playful and love to socialize, then Papermint is for you! The game is free to play and can be played on both PC and Mac.

Here you can see a Papermint game play video:

http://www.youtube.com/teampapermint#p/u/4/G9n-eWtYhd0

The Papermint Experience

Papermint is peaceful and social, but you'll find plenty of fun challenges to aim for: become an ace fashion designer and store manager, the most popular celebrity, a powerful judge or most creative gardener, showing off gorgeous plants discovered at far away secret islands! You can achieve all these and much more within the Papermint society.

The main challenge in Papermint might – like in the real world – be finding friends and managing relationships. As Chief Game Designer and CEO Lev Ledit (a former movie director) says, “it is the people after all who fill the papery world with life and create their own stories. To support this, Papermint provides myriads of tools and opportunities to offer the players a licence to communicate“. Papermint is unique in that it focuses on the psyche and the inner values of its players. The game design incorporates a highly sophisticated profile system consisting of traced player behaviour and deliberately selected characteristics, and the deep insights created by this system are displayed in a magic "soul box", which floats above each player's head.

A Day in the Life of a Paperminter is all about social interaction, playing and getting creative. Imagine the fun you can have:

- You create a character on the web, and Papermint launches automatically.

- As you start to explore the amazing new world, you meet some friendly tapirs and have a chat with fellow Paperminters. It is easy to find like-minded friends, and you play a few games with them.

- The urge to look a bit more chic leads you into a trendy paper boutique (Papermint is based on item selling), where you find an incredible selection of clothes. So many choices!

- You wander out looking fierce in a new outfit, and find some rare mint, an in-game currency that makes your Papermint life easier in many ways without the need to pay real money. There are other plants growing everywhere too, and you can't resist picking them ... which is a good idea as they are the creative resources to create fashion, furniture or graffiti (UGC).

- Suddenly, someone gorgeous catches your eye. In the wonderful world of Papermint, it's easy to fall in love, especially because the wedding parties are so much fun to organise! You dream of renting a flat and furnishing it with that special someone, and perhaps even starting a family. It's important to know that the consequence of a successfully completed round of the “child-making-game“ is of course... pregnancy! One partner carries the child to term, and the happy couple looks forward to meeting their baby – the NEXT REAL PLAYER logging into Papermint!

The Art Of Papermint

Papermint’s uniquely quirky and stylised visual appearance, the unconventional usage of 2D in a 3D world, is the vision of its Art Director Dr Babsi (Dr Barbara Lippe). Her goal was to make a game that “doesn't look realistic, but feels very real“. Unlike anything else out there, Papermint is a virtual world where everything is made from paper! Papermint players can turn into paper balls and start an ad-hoc football match, change into a paper boat and sail the ocean to discover the remotest corners of the Papermint world, or just take care of their papery kitten.

The Team Behind Papermint

The unusual visual approach and innovative game design also reflect the unbreakable indie spirit of the Papermint team. Half of the development team at Avaloop (currently four people) is female. Lead Tech Claudia Kogler, CTO, and Art Director Dr Babsi were the first to join Lev Ledit, Game Designer and inventor of Papermint, on the challenging but enriching journey to create an MMO from scratch – the indie way. Martin Porocnik, Papermint's server programmer, joined later and quickly became an irreplaceable part of the team.

Over the three years it took to create Papermint, the Avaloop team went through the heaven and hell of entrepreneurship. Staff grew and shrank again, and the game was juggled between nearly all the big players in the global entertainment business, the company moved from Vienna to London… and stayed indie. Papermint was lumped together with Second Life, then Animal Crossing... Google Lively and then Pet Society, but Papermint was always planned to be just Papermint – the very first game of its kind, which is now finally ready to launch.

In line with their Austrian heritage, Papermint's development-motto was: "Let's sausage through that!" (a very, very Austrian saying, meaning something like: "Come on, we can master it ... somehow!"... the underground way). And they did.

You can see a video about the Papermint team in their natural habitats here:

http://www.youtube.com/teampapermint#p/u/0/Oc8fkXlwQfE

A very deep, insightful and extremely personal story on the development process of Papermint, a story oozing with sweat, tears and human drama is by Art Director Babsi and to find here:

http://www.papermint.com/loveletter

More Resources

A lot of useful material to download (screenshots, logo, team photos, songs, game guide comics, texts etc) is to find here:

http://www.papermint.com/press

Contact

press [at] papermint.com