Video Game / Everybody Edits

"Share your levels with the whole online community! Join the newest online sensation and start creating today!"

— 2011 promo video

Everybody Edits is a series of multiplayer Level Editors begun by Chris Benjaminsen in March of 2010. In online versions, levels being played are listed in the Game Lobby, and can be joined, left or edited at any time. Some levels require the creator's permission to edit, while others can be edited by anybody.

Players are represented by the Digital Avatar of a smiley face, and can quickly move through the games' worlds which feature extensive gravity manipulation mechanics. There are also more complex tools like portals, signs, effect blocks, and doors and more. Although the gameplay is simple, the wide toolkit can be used for a variety of purposes such as Metroidvanias, visual art, music, story-based levels, basic calculators, Role-Playing, or just plain Platform Hell.

The series has had several installments over the years:

• Everybody Edits Flash (2010-2020): Also known as just Everybody Edits, this was the sole version for nearly a decade. Blocks, smileys, worlds, and more could be bought through the energy shop, or found through various secret methods. Campaigns were introduced in 2015, which are themed series of staff-approved levels. It ended support alongside Adobe Flash Player.
  • Everybody Edits Offline (2020): An offline version where campaigns and old levels can still be loaded and played without online servers. All blocks and smileys are freely usable in this version.
• Everybody Edits Universe (Private Beta 2019-): A prototype of a sequel, introducing zoning mechanics that allow editors to make areas of worlds with special mechanics. Although the game is still playable for some with access to it, development for it has been cancelled.
• Everybody Edits! (TBA): The current planned successor to the Flash version. Worlds from that version and Universe are planned to be transferable to Everybody Edits!, though the details have yet to be finalized. It is planned to be much larger than either the previous versions at launch, with massive worlds, customization, parallax backgrounds, more action blocks, new edit tools, and more.

The official message boards can be found here, and the official wiki can be found here.

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The Everybody Edits series contains examples of:

Series In General

• Action Bar: There's a bar at the button of the screen with a button to quit the level, an info button, a Level-Map Display button, and more. Some of the contents depend on the version of the game, and what features the player currently has access to.
• Alliterative Title: The title Everybody Edits is alliterative.
• Ascended Glitch: The fully black block which appears invisible on the Level-Map Display was originally available through a bug in early versions of Everybody Edits Flash. This involved clicking a precise row of pixels, which selects an invalid block without a texture to build with.
• Big Red Devil: The Devil smiley is red, with a grin and demon horns.
• Black Bead Eyes: Most of the smileys have black lines for eyes. A few smileys' eyes are in different shapes or colours, however.
• Christmas Songs: Instrumental versions of "Jingle Bells", a festive song about sleighing are often featured in Christmas-themed content.
• Cool Shades: Depending on the version, the Cool Sunglasses appear either as a wearable cosmetic or as part of the Cool Smiley.
• Derivative Differentiation: Various early graphics in Everybody Edits Flash are derived from Facebook's former smiley icons, or tiles from the Super Mario Bros. series. Everybody Edits Universe redesigns all the tiles and tweaks the smiley's appearance, and Everybody Edits! changes the graphics even further as a result of being an Art-Shifted Sequel.
• Digital Avatar: Each player is represented by a smiley face, and there's a variety to choose from.
• Directionally Solid Platforms: One-way blocks are a category of block that act as solid on one side. The exact functionality depends on the game.
• Double Jump: The Double Jump effect changes how many times a player's character can jump before needing to touch the ground again. It can even make jumps infinite or disable them altogether.
• Drop-In-Drop-Out Multiplayer: In online versions, players can join and leave levels at any time as long as they're public.
• Emergent Gameplay: Using a bunch of simple blocks, a player can create many complex systems not within the original scope of Everybody Edits.
• Endless Game: The game never ends, as long as players keep making levels.
• Energy Economy: Players get energy to spend in a shop over time, represented by a yellow lightning bolt.
• Fake Platform: One of the Secret blocks appears solid, but instantly vanishes when touched from any side. After that, it appears as a smaller, unfilled square.
• Floating Platforms: Blocks can be placed anywhere, including liquids.
• Follow the Money: Gold and blue coins can be placed and collected in worlds. There are coin doors and gates which disappear or appear if enough coins are collected, enabling players to design worlds where getting coins changes the layout of the level.
• God Mode: If the player has access to it, they can switch their character between regular mode and God Mode. God Mode allows it to fly in front of any solid blocks, as well as preventing death, infection, and teleportation.
• Gravity Screw: Gravity tiles and effects can change the direction of gravity, affecting how a smiley moves. There are also gravity effects and world settings, which can increase or decrease the weight of smileys.
• "Have a Nice Day" Smile: Players are represented by smiley faces. This include different expressions, such as frowning and laughing. Smileys can also come with accessories representing different occupations, such as a construction worker and a police officer, as well as various animals and fantasy creatures.
• Holiday Mode: Holidays come in the form of blocks, smileys, campaigns, contests, as well as modified menus and logos. They include all four seasons in addition to New Year's Day, April Fools' Day, Halloween, and Christmas, plus various smaller holiday celebrations specifically for Everybody Edits Flash. Seasons or holidays may also just be skipped entirely, depending on the year.
• Jump Physics: With the default gravity, the player's smiley can jump several times its own height.
• Ladder Physics: Climbable tiles such as ladders and vines automatically slow movement when touched, and can be navigated in any direction.
• Level Editor: The core premise of the series is being able to edit and share worlds. Most worlds can be edited at any time, even while others are playing. Worlds can also be owned and protected, requiring permission from the world owner before it can be edited.
• Level-Map Display: Each level can be seen on the minimap unless set otherwise. Every visible block has a unique colour, and players' smileys appear as dots with fading trails. A player's own smiley appears green, while other smileys appear white. Some smileys have unique colours in Everybody Edits Flash.
• Locked Door: Doors and gates are locked until the right conditions are met.
  • Coins open up coin doors and coin gates if enough of the same colour are collected. However, the game lacks a way to carry or spend coins, so collecting a coin just increases the number collected within the world.
  • Switch doors and gates are opened by switches, either local, only affecting the player who switched it, or global—affecting all players.
• Mummy: The Mummy smiley is covered in bandages and has glowing green eyes. In Everybody Edits Flash it's associated with Halloween.
• Ninja: The Ninja smiley has a black hood, and in Everybody Edits Flash it's one of the few stealthy smileys that don't appear on the Level-Map Display.
• No Plot? No Problem!: Although individual levels may have their own stories, the series overall does not commit to any plot or narrative.
• Player Creation Sharing: Online versions of Everybody Edits act as a live Level Editor. Players can instantly join and modify levels that others are playing, when permitted by the level owner.
• Player Tic: If a player gets stuck somewhere, expect them to jump around everywhere.
• Rainbow Motif: Many block packages are ordered in a rainbow colour scheme.
• Slash Command: The series has several commands activated with chat messages that begin with a forward slash (/). This can include things such as world management, private messaging, resetting a player's own position in the world, and reporting rule-breaking. Later innovations in Everybody Edits Flash would make these commands less necessary, as many command functions would be available with more settings in the graphical interface.
• Speech Bubbles:
  • Speech bubbles appear above NPCs or smileys when talking. A smaller bubble with "..." appears above NPCs before initiating a dialogue, or above smileys when moving.
  • A black speech bubble appears above a sign that's being read, or above a tile whose metadata is being checked.
• Teleportation:
  • Portals can take smileys from one place in a map to another instantly.
  • There are Slash Commands that can instantly move smileys throughout a world.
• Video Game Perversity Potential: In a Level Editor where players can build anything, this should be expected. Many open worlds had inappropriate things in them.
• Void Between the Worlds: Every world has a border which cannot be passed, and beyond it there's a black emptiness that cannot be accessed or modified. It appears transparent on the Level-Map Display, which also applies to the fully black blocks, giving the appearance that those blocks are also part of the "void".

Everybody Edits! (Upcoming)

• Art-Shifted Sequel: Previews show more colourful sprites, heavier use of multi-part tilesets, and smileys with bigger, shinier eyes making them look more like Big Anime Eyes.
• Cute Slime Mook: In the official Everybody Edits! Discord server, Satanya posted a scrapped graphic of a Slime Smiley. It's a bouncy, smiling, vibrant blue slime.
• Easter Egg: In the New Years' teaser, the castle from EX Crew's "Ice Level" can be seen as a silhouette in the snowy background.
• Eggshell Clothing: One of the smileys previewed by Satanya in the game's official Discord server is a smiley wearing two halves of an eggshell.
• Head Pet: One of the wearable items shown in the Everybody Edits! Discord server is a green, wiggling blob that rests on a smiley's head.
• Horns of Villainy: Sprites of the Demon Skull smiley teased on the game's official chat server show that it has large, imposing horns.
• White Bunny: Unlike the Bunny in Everybody Edits Flash which uses the generic yellow colour of most smileys, the Bunny smiley seen in previews such as "New Artstyle | Progress Report" is white.

The Everybody Edits Blog & Game Business

• Aliens Speaking English: A blog post shows off aliens who come in peace and have returned Laika to some smileys.
• April Fools' Day:
  • The post from April Fool's Day 2016 mentions that a third Fan Boy smiley could be gotten by collecting 100,000 blue coins in a world. (It's fake. Also, you couldn't place that many coins in one world through normal means.)
  • For April Fool's Day 2021, Satanya made a Self-Parody announcement thread stating Everybody Edits! was being replaced with Everybody Edits MUwUltiverse, a game exactly the same (but different and new) as Everybody Edits Flash, all of which written in Baby Talk. Later that day, she also posted that this was being replaced yet again with Everybody Edits String Theory.
• Christmas Songs: An instrumental version of "Jingle Bells" is featured in the 2011 Christmas promo video. A smiley also briefly tries to play it using the game's music blocks.
• I Come in Peace: "Mars" shows aliens who state they come in peace, and seem to be peacefully interacting with earthlings.
• Klaatu Barada Nikto: The blog post "I for one welcome our new smiley overlords" includes an image of a Dark Wizard saying the line "Klaatu... verata..."
• Mythology Gag: EE Universe Closed Beta Info has a screenshot from EEU that pays homage to an early Loading Screen for Everybody Edits Flash.
• Shout-Out: Many titles of blog posts appear to be references to popular culture.
  • "Throw the third switch!" is a reference to Young Frankenstein, a reference which is explicitly mentioned in the post.
  • "Can't touch this" introduces the Potion of Protection, and appears to be a reference to the MC Hammer song, "U Can't Touch This".
  • "Theme of the living dead" introduces zombies, and the name resembles the title of the zombie film Night of the Living Dead (1968).
  • "Evil Dead" introduces Bruce the Zombie Slayer, referencing the Evil Dead movie franchise, and the main character being a zombie slayer played by Bruce Campbell.
  • "Wizard of Oz?" introduces the Scarecrow smiley. The story The Wonderful Wizard of Oz shares a similar name and includes a scarecrow as a major character.
  • The title of "I for one welcome our new smiley overlords" is a paraphrased line from The Simpsons episode "Deep Space Homer".
• Signing-Off Catchphrase: From September 2012 to April 2015, most posts end with "See you in the worlds!"
• Speed Stripes: The blog post introducing Boost Arrows shows the Daredevil smiley with Speed Stripes.

Official Everybody Edits Forums

• April Fools' Day: The game's forums will often goof around on April Fools' day, sometimes through an Interface Screw. While turned off by default, they can be re-enabled under profile settings. These include:
  • 2011's "Upside Down Forums" flips the forum display upside-down.
  • From 2015, the "Teh Languagickle of Teh Kittehs" event causes all text in posts to resemble posts by "iPwner," a user that who has been known to write in a distinct, cat-themed fashion.
  • In 2016, the game's forum had "Monsters Among Us" which amounts to odd noises randomly playing, and links that sometimes run away from being clicked.
  • In 2019, the names of admin users and forum sections were jokingly changed temporarily. The lead admin, Different55, was also jokingly banned.
  • In 2020, it was put under "quarantine" from the COVID-19 Pandemic, meaning posts could only be posted in the Quarantine section which was only available that day.
  • In 2022, the spambot filter was temporarily disabled, allowing lots of spambots to register accounts and post threads.
  • In 2023, the index included a small Platform Game at the bottom, and no longer listed any forum sections except the new Playground. Like 2020's Quarantine, Playground was a temporary joke section without much moderation.
• The Artifact: The forums' form of rating a good post is called Woots, which is still named after the long-replaced likes feature in Everybody Edits Flash.
• Dreaming of a White Christmas: The forums are sometimes covered in snowflakes during Christmastime.
• Easter Egg:
  • Hidden in the HTML source, there's also a randomized comment encouraging you to enable the Silliness Switch in the profile settings if it isn't enabled.
  • When the Nostalgia display theme is enabled, there's a hidden HTML comment giving credit to various people who helped created the theme.
• Emoticon: The "Teh Languagickle of Teh Kittehs" event causes the emoticon >=3 to appear in posts.
• Fun with Autocensors: For a period of time, Linus21, the name of a troll who often spammed offensive content and evaded bans would be filtered to "the one whose name shall never be spoken".
• Holiday Mode: For Christmas, the forums are covered in falling snowflake particles.
• Interface Screw:
  • For April Fools' Day 2011, the forum display was flipped upside-down.
  • During April Fools' Day 2016, on-page links would sometimes run away from being clicked.
• The Scottish Trope: Linus21, the name of an infamous troll was once automatically replaced with "the one whose name shall never be spoken".
• Self-Deprecation:
  • The description for Forum Games admits that it's a form of "structured spamming".
  • The description for Compost Bin (known as Topic Graveyard at the time) was once a rant about its perceived uselessness before its purpose was solidified.
    Seriously, what is the point of this forum? Are we trying to make it harder to look for old topics and questions that actually have answers? We don't even put locked topics in here anymore and locked topics sink to the bottom anyway.
• Silliness Switch: Some of the silly April Fools' Day settings can be reactivated through profile settings.

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