This week there was a question on Discord that I think is worth posting the answer to on this blog.

The questions was:

I’d like to know how Evergreen relates to the new Survivor Z. Could one import an Evergreen creation (probably their own) to SZ and vice versa? With the scripting/notes tool could one add items/loot? And one more thing, will these events be in the actual survivor Z? Or will they be vetted/only put in if winning a challenge or the like?

This is a great question, and while I’ve been explaining different aspects of the platform, it’s clearly time to explicitly connect the dots. So, Evergreen is the name of the content management engine at the heart of ZDay: Survivor. It manages all of the “story” related pieces and is the starting point for all content authoring in the game. However, stories in Survivor are more than just stories: there are items to be found, and fights to be fought, etc. To that end, all of the stories written by the development/in-house content teams use a version of Evergreen that is in our development environment, and it has additional capabilities to “decorate” stories with all of the other game specific things you expect in Survivor. However, it’s still the same exact engine that you find at evergreen.ink

In the past, (and hopefully in the future) Survivor has had professional writers create stories for the game, but the authoring tool has always been cumbersome for people outside of the core team. One of the purposes of releasing Evergreen is to allow third party authors an easy way to do what they do best without having to deal with game specific components (like adding combat.)

With that being said, we also hope that by opening up the tool, people that love the game will also be inspired to write content for Survivor. It isn’t implemented yet, but we plan to have a mechanism to allow Evergreen users to submit content to be considered for inclusion in the Survivor universe. Once submitted, the development team will review the content and do the work of “decorating” the submitted story with appropriate combat and item discovery actions to round out the game play. Evergreen includes a notes field on each card that allows story authors to leave information about the card for the developers as well (“put a fight with runners here” or “user should find a flashlight” etc.)

So that is what we are hoping the process looks like. We know that the tool is easy to use, and we are excited to open it up soon to the broader community because we know that many in the player community are incredibly creative. It’s going to be amazing!