Game Projects

Layout

The overworld is an "infinite" 2D grid with the central sections reserved for whatever I want to do with them (and some empty space as well for future expansion).

Each tile can be claimed by a player (one claim made per day, no rollover) and contain anything whatsoever, though there's a hard cap of how much can be contained within a single tile or room so there aren't just a billion paths.

Worlds

Players of the hub game can construct Worlds (one per tile) of various types. These can be handcrafted, procedural or a mix and can embed recursively.

Handcrafted worlds are better for mazes / games / just interactive content in general, while procedural worlds are better for Materials gathering (more on that in a bit), just general showcasing of conworlds, and so on.

Worlds can be moved if you have permission to move it (more on this in the Security section) and it's going to either an unclaimed tile or switching with a claimed one if someone with permissions there agrees (same permission).

Worlds can contain their own inventory system with different limits from the hub one for more creative freedom and personalized experiences. The tools and functionality there are a mix of xifnet and NIFE, with an eye on plugin-based flexibility to strike an individual balance between complexity and UX.

X0ins

X0ins are the centralized currency.

They're obtained exclusively by mining a procedural area and are pretty rare there. Materials can also be registered there (with lower drop rates than other worlds, maybe 50%) so you can mine other useful stuff while hunting for X0ins.

X0ins are also spent irrevocably on quality of life upgrades -- nothing that impacts creative freedom of Worlds, just things that improve hub game quality of life. Vehicles / vehicle upgrades probably cost X0ins for example. Same deal with stuff in the Fishing engine. Maybe some perks in Farming, etc. Maybe additional claims (particularly Market ones).

This makes X0ins rare, inflationary/deflationary and gives them intrinsic value as well.

Shops

You can set up a Shop on a claimed Market tile. The Market is its own infinite grid. You can also set one up elsewhere but the Market obviously gives you more visibility.

You can set the stock for things, the prices, things you're looking for with X0ins assigned to your shop to buy them, offer honor-based services, etc. Should be very flexible.

Fishing / Dyes

There's a Fishing system that borrows from all of my other projects. Fish give you access to Dyes, which are how you color-code things you've built, paths, put color in text, etc. Materials handle the bg AND the fg so there's still more distinction there.

New fish can be Registered and fall into the use limits there -- their stats are procgenned depending on the dyes they contain. Lakes are just created or upgraded via the Claiming system and the fish they contain is probably user-set since that list is going to spiral wildly out of control -- though can also be randomized on setup or offer wildcard fish.

Dyes are hexcodes and fish can contain 1-3 of them, possibly also with "types" for different things (world layouts, text, paths, items, etc). Same deal with fonts probably, maybe other formatting stuff.

The fishing engine has a depth mechanic as well as a lure mechanic and multiple equippable procgen/blast furnace fishing rods. Bait is probably too messy to implement -- it's better if users can just fish at their leisure.

Materials

Entities of various kinds are made *out* of something, and these materials (which appear with both BG and fg) need to be Registered, to the tune of probably one per day.

For example if you want a Glass Bookcase, then you have to either gather/make Glass (if it's already Registered) or Register it yourself.

Registering a material gives you full creative control over it -- you can register specific objects (say, Bookcases should always contain 10 glass), where the material appears, what it looks like, and so on. This doesn't impact existing objects though -- if you change Bookcases to contain 5 glass later on then Bookcases with 10 glass still have 10 within them.

Materials can be Raw, Farmed, Refined or Crafted, or any combination and plurality the owner of the Material Registration wants:

Raw -- Can be Gathered in procedural worlds (more on this in the Gathering section)

Farmed -- on the Farming system (more on that later)

Refined -- created from an existing registered material in a 1:1 relationship. Costs Fuel too.

Crafted -- created from 2+ resources. Can cost fuel but it isn't explicitly required.

More on both Refined/Crafted items in the Material Transformations section.

Gathering

The owner of a registered material (or anyone they've granted permissions to do this) can make a resource be one of the resources obtainable in a World that they have this permission for (one of their own, one where permission is granted, a public world that anyone can use).

They pick the subregion in the world that has it + the chance of getting it, up to some hard cutoff.

Resources gathered in this way are permanently removed from the world for all players, however they're procedural locations (that store world coordinates separately from wherever a player comes in), so there's endless possibilities.

A consumable will increase the chances of getting a duplicate item, with the exception of X0ins.

Speaking of X0ins, whichever world hosts them is set to public so you can pull in additional resources as well as you go -- the X0ins just take precedent.

Farming

Farming serves a few purposes:

Green and yellow dyes (based on hue). All other colors are handled by fish, with grayscale sat=0 ones always available.

One of the targets of Materials Registration (like if you want to open a lemonade stand you'd register lemons and make them farmable)

A source of consumables that do various quality of life things. There might be overlap with ones you can buy with X0ins but maybe not.

Farming takes real-world time and gives a yield in various ways (see Skygarden). All the stats here are procgenned based on the plant name.

Consumables are on a Cooking system (more on that in a bit).

Farms can just be created sandbox-style without limits, though granted getting seeds can be tricky. And they have to be harvested by hand.

Inventory / Storage

You have a limited inventory space, but can upgrade it a bit with X0ins (though this gets exponentially harder).

Instead, it makes sense to use Luggage. Luggage are things like Suitcases, Backpacks, whatever that store additional items, including other Luggage in a recursive Matryoshka way. Luggage can also be upgraded with X0ins with the same pricy scaling.

Luggage Creation

Luggage has a Capacity, a Type (single item or grab-bag), and the amount of inventory (or luggage/container) slots it takes up. These are procgenned based on the material and the name of the item. Single item luggage has a 3x mult on whatever its capacity is.

These stats are procgenned and there are some rare ones that are very valuable in one way or another. You can Trademark these so that you're the only person who can make these (one claim per day).

You make Luggage at a Luggager (name subject to change) fixture, or you could just buy it from the market if anyone is selling it (see: rare types). The GTX0 market offers a few crappy ones at a high price and an infinite stock with X0ins just being thrown into the void. It costs 10 of some material and you name what it is, ie "Leather Backpack" or "Iron Carryall".

You can also rename your luggage so you know what's actually in there for matryoshka purposes.

Containers

Containers function similarly to Luggage but are placeable fixtures rather than carriable items. Similar procgenning and 10 cost but a universal mult on capacity (maybe 4x).

Containers of the same type can be Merged -- it costs 5 of some material and grants a bonus (based on that material), and then merges their stats. Plus they take up less room than two containers.

Like everything else, once a container is clear of stored items, you can get its merge / creation materials back.

Containers can fit luggage but not other Containers since they aren't items. Containers can however be moved somehow -- probably just one at a time via a pushpull mechanic.

I'm not sure yet how placing fixtures (or working with merges) work, I'll get to that soon.

Vehicles

Vehicles are a combination of a character and a set of rooms, allowing for mobile bases. They have a Driver that actually moves them around and a set amount of Passengers. When in a vehicle, you move through the rooms the driver drives around in in real time (or close).

Since they're Characters they can have consumables applied (provided they have the Food-o-matic module installed) and gather resources, but it's probably more economical to have your passengers get out and gather stuff.

While paired to a Vehicle, the Driver can recall all passengers that are still in the same world, regardless of where they are.

Vehicles also enable multiplayer mazes -- in that particular case any items a player picks up / things they interact with change the shared vehicle inventory/etc instead. Assuming the world actually allows for this of course. And assuming the people bound to the vehicle all agree to this. Might want to really work on the specifics here.

Outside of Worlds where the vehicle *is* the character, they just have internal rooms where you can put down containers and/or store luggage rather than the vehicle having an inventory capacity.

Vehicle Creation

Vehicles have a set number of passengers and rooms (which have additional limits -- no merged containers, a fixed amount of fixtures per room).

They cost a bunch of non-farmable resources to make (maybe 100x?) and their stats are procgenned based purely on the material. The name can be whatever you want, with the default being "<material> truck". They can also be bought with the default ones kind of sucking and expensive. There's definitely a lucrative market if you've found some great cars and can gather the materials quick enough.

They can be upgraded in various ways at a vehicle upgrading fixture but this gets pricy quick via the exponential thing.

Vehicles have their own permission thing where only certain people can be a passenger or driver depending on the rules set by who owns them. They can even be public -- you could make two-person bicycles and leave them around if you wanted to.

I'm not sure if there's a Fuel mechanic -- this wouldn't apply inside Worlds that are separate games or whatever, just stuff local to the hub game. Might be too annoying honestly.

Owners of claimed areas can set a "no parking" flag, otherwise people can park their vehicles wherever.

Vehicles can fit inside other vehicles, though there are limits there -- Rooms have to be delineated as Hangars and you can fit 2 vehicles per Hangar, and can't recursively stack them since it's based on subhangars as well. Idk, will want to explore.

Scrolls

Scrolls are the replacement of the threads/posts system. They're items and are modular in various ways, making them pretty unique.

They're more like chatrooms, but long-form stuff is also supported (see: nodecloud) and these are all tied to the scroll itself, which is a physical item that can be displayed, put into an inventory/luggage/container, sold, etc.

Permissions/moderation (both blacklisting and whitelisting are supported) is set by whoever owns the scroll, and they can just get rid of them altogether if they want.

There's a way of cloning a scroll in both read-only and full interaction modes -- this doesn't actually clone it, it's just a way of streaming it. This allows remote communication for example. Or you could leave scroll clones lying around in public for people to interact with.

Scroll Desks

Scroll Desks are a fixture that act a bit like a forum and aggregate Scrolls. The difference is that whoever owns the Scroll Desk is in charge of permissions/moderation (with grants obviously). Also if Scrolls cost anything to make, they don't here.

There's some means of accessing a Scroll Desk remotely. Not sure how that works exactly.

Also the scrolls here can be pulled into items by anyone with permission to actually do that (depends on how the scroll desk is set up)

The Scrollarium

The Scrollarium is a GTX0 3D World that's basically a big building with a fixed width/length and infinite height. X0ins are Scattered infrequently on some timer or something up to some maximum (more on this in Scattering).

Anyway, you can claim individual Cubicles to place Scroll Desks in (one per week or something). And decorate your area however you like.

The ground floor aggregates all scroll desks in the building by activity (and X0in spending to some extent), operating as a kind of centralized forum system.

All of this uses the same exact skeined tools as everything else, so you could totally make your own Scrollarium if you wanted to.

Probably X0ffee machines for fun, or they might actually do something herein.

There's remote access to the aggregators/scroll desks here as well. I do quite like the idea of being able to physically wander around forums though.

The basement floors (also infinite) are for Pouch stuff. They can be variously public or not. It just gets assigned to a floor/storage closet when a pouch node gets registered, which is kinda tightly controlled.

Formatting/etc Stuff

I'm not sure everything that's supported here -- tables and stuff are there for sure. Colors/fonts/etc use the dye system.

You can embed items into a scroll in some way for other users to pick up, or clones that can be picked up by multiple people. I need to think about this carefully so it isn't just an alternate storage solution.

The Library

The Library is a branched handcrafted World that stores free books -- gutenberg, etc in sections which are also themed around their content (like mars stories would seem to be set on Mars).

You can do two things here:

Read anything in the Library for free. Books are literal items so if you're done reading you can just drop a book on a desk or into the collection bin which puts it back on the shelf where it belongs. Book locations in the Library are also tracked (via Catalogue fixtures) if something is out of place. You can't take library books out of the library.

Buy a book for X0ins. This clones it into an item. You can then do whatever with it -- it is streaming the book though, not a hard clone of it. These books can be read remotely or in any Pouch instance whatsoever.

There's some kind of application process for writers who've written stuff and want to get it hosted in the GTX0 library. In that particular case they earn the X0ins that are spent to clone their book. The price is fixed though. You can delete it from the library at any time -- that removes it from bought books, the library, items stored, etc.

Librarians can be assigned (by me or anyone else with that permission) to organize the books/make rooms/etc. It's just on the same world-based permission system as everything else.

Wands

I'm thinking that fixture placement / room building / fixture moving / etc options are things contained within Wand items so it's a plugin type system that makes sense, with a few additional caveats:

No personal inventory limit on Wands.

Wands can be created at a Wandmaker fixture for free. Not sure how you make one of these if you need Wands to make fixtures.

Wands can be combined together or separated back out. Again for free.

I definitely don't want to overcomplicate the creation process, so this will require more work likely.

More Market Stuff

You don't have to have a single booth, you can totally create a 2D or 3D Building for your shop (granted these upgrades cost X0ins).

Lemonade Operation

This post describes how a lemonade operation might work.

Market -- you claim a Market tile and name it "Lemonade Stand". It contains a single Booth that sells the Registered recipe Lemonade for x0ins. Also has a Scrolldesk.

Factory -- somewhere out in the hub wilderness you claim a tile for your lemonade factory.

Factory Mechanics

On that tile, you set up a 2D handcrafted world with this layout:

Craft Area	Entrance	Office
Sugar Refinery	Boiler Room	Juice Refinery
Sugarcane Farm	Storage World	Lemon Farm

This factory world is set to be publicly accessible (which subinherits) but you've whitelisted the actual interactables. Anything green there is a separate World.

Entrance -- just allows you to enter and exit the World for immersion purposes rather than it saving your coord the way procedural Worlds tend to work. Has a guestbook scroll. Also has a mechanism that recalls the Lemonade Tractor Vehicle, which is locked to the Lemonade Factory World.

Craft Area -- contains a Workbench fixture with the Registered Lemonade recipe (water+sugar+lemon).

Office -- contains several Desks. One tracks the market booth, one tracks the Farms, one handles all the scrolls associated with the operation.

Boiler -- handles fuel requirements of the Factory world (which subinherits).

Sugar Refinery -- has a fixture that allows you to turn Sugarcane into Sugar with Fuel. This recipe is Registered.

Juice Refinery -- same deal here, but turns Lemons into Lemon Juice.

Sugarcane Farm / Lemon Farm -- your actual farms. More on these in a bit, but they're separate Subworlds.

Storage World -- you've created a 2D handcrafted world here for the sake of storing things easily. I shouldn't need to go into details, but there's a lot of room.

Farms

These are 2D handcrafted worlds, or maybe procedural ones for flavor so it isn't just squares of increasing size of your operation.

You've made (or bought) a Lemonade Tractor, a vehicle with a good bit of internal storage. You take it around your farm and manually move farmed sugarcane and lemons into its internal storage areas until either full or you've harvested everything. These worlds have fixed entrances for immersion and this contains a Desk for the local farm accordingly.

You then drive the vehicle around and do what's needed to make Lemonade. Fuel is also stored in Storage World, which maybe also has a Templated Desk type that tracks all of your various fuel storage locations (including common ones for groups you're a part of).

Lemonade Truck

You also have a Lemonade Truck parked outside. All but one of its containers are single item so it can hold a pretty large quantity of Lemonade. You load it up, and then drive it to your market booth.

Once there, you unload the vehicle into the booth and collect any X0ins you've earned.

You could of course just use an Aleph to move around, or a two-way Portal, but you've chosen the manual vehicle approach for immersion purposes.

Cooking/Food Notes v0

Food is a specific type of Registered item trait (that subinherits with recipes containing all food items).

Cooking allows you to transform food in various ways, as well as create recipes to craft food together, etc. The tools for this and what they can do to a food (like pans that fry) are also Registered, with some of it in place already at launch. Possibly a Fuel or Time mechanic as well.

There are optional hunger/thirst/etc mechanics for immersion -- it's opt in rather than opt out, but it does at least give food more of a purpose. These stats don't tick down in IF instances, just anything related to the hub game.

I think fridge/etc concerns are probably overcomplicated, but there will be a Fridge container registered at launch that holds more food items than other containers.

Recipes can be registered somehow -- it doesn't make the food for you but lets you remember it more easily. Or could just shuffle it off onto the Scrolls system.

Ingredients are easily accessible -- you can't get them back but you can see what kind of food is in what you're eating.

Fuel Stuff

Fuel is needed for Refining as well as maybe other things (food prep and the blast furnace come to mind). It's stored on a subloc basis (so like one factory or whatever) and fuel increase is done via Boiler fixtures placed wherever you want within. Fuel can also optionally subinherit, but probably doesn't do this by default.

Fuel is used whenever you actually refine or something -- it doesn't passively tick down.

Fuel Obtaining

Fuel sources can be registered like any other material. Fuel sources have two stats:

Fuel amount -- the actual amount of fuel you get from the item

Activation cost -- better fuel sources offer orders of magnitude more fuel, but require fuel (and time) to make it. This stat dictates how much fuel it takes to make it -- the net is still going to be pretty high.

Activation time -- same as the above but handles the time mechanic.

Fuel that needs to be Activated is done so at a Fuel Activator fixture, runs these mechanics, and prepends "Activated" before it. The word "Activated" itself can't be in any registered material as this would be confusing. Or it might just be indicated by a + sign.

Batteries

Any material tagged as metal can turn irreversibly into the homogeneous material Metal via some fixture that I import from Shatterloop (I forget what it's called).

Metal can be turned into empty batteries of some whole number of watts at a battery station, and the battery station allows you to transfer whole capacities both directions from local fuel and batteries.

Matryoshka Vehicles

Vehicles can contain other Vehicles as mentioned. Honestly, it doesn't make sense to limit this much -- you already have matryoshka containers for making storage infinite and I quite like the idea of wonky fractal mobile bases.

The one limit here is that passenger containment is additive -- a Vehicle with 4 slots can accommodate 4 total people even if 2 of them are inside a vehicle. Vehicles themselves don't count towards that limit.

To allow vehicles inside a vehicle, mark one of your rooms a Hangar. Each hangar room allows 2 vehicles to be assigned here, and they can also be recalled once assigned. Which gets fun if people are out on missions -- recall people to a subvehicle, then recall the subvehicles, coordinated by remote Scrolls. Recall of both types probably costs Fuel.

If you want more vehicles, assign additional Hangar rooms. Note that Hangar rooms can't contain anything else besides the vehicles. Hangar rooms also allow quick deployment that ejects the vehicle outside of its parent, with recall being free if the subvehicle and parent are in the same room.

Teleportation

Teleportation comes in two forms:

Alephs -- Scroll-like items that allow you to store locations inside them and then teleport there instantaneously. They do have some limits, just for immersion purposes.

Portals -- allow you to link remote rooms together on the creation engine. Can't be placed in Vehicle rooms, but anything else is okay even if you're traversing a bunch of sublocs with both.

Alephs

Alephs are items that have 5 slots that you can store locations in -- when you're somewhere you can remap one of the slots to your current location. This doesn't work with Vehicle Rooms.

You can buy them with X0ins in the Market.

Like other items, they can be sold, gifted or otherwise traded.

Portals

You can place Portals somehow, and they probably require Fuel via Batteries. Maybe based on the distance/subloc recursion if that makes any kind of sense.

Attractor -- you name this whatever.

Repulsor -- links to an Attractor you have Permission to access (or just ones you've placed).

Multiple Repulsors can go to the same Attractor. This isn't a two-way connection.

Wormhole -- this kind of portal goes two-ways but you can't many-to-one it. I'm not sure how you place these exactly. Also they cost 2x the fuel for obvious reasons.

Water

Water is on a bit of a different system than other materials.

Like Batteries, it goes into containers which have some water current capacity and max capacity. When pouring them you get to pick the amount to pour, which can't be more than the maximum of the pouree, nor more than the capacity of the pourer.

These containers can hold both Mudwater and regular water, but only one of them at a time.

Lakes (or other fishing spots) provide an infinite amount of dirty water. A filtering machine will then make a container of Mudwater turn into a container of water for the cost of Fuel.

Water is a component of drinks. It can also turn into ice at an icemaker (which costs Fuel) or melted back out (which also does, inconveniently).

Keycard

Keycard is the name of the permissions system. Everything that requires some kind of permission (or allows bans) runs on Keycard, such as:

Vehicles

Scrolls + Scrolldesks

Sublocs

Individual Rooms

Useful Fixtures

Portals

Item Registration

Librarians

Permissions

Each type of permissive entity (Permor) has several different types of permission (for example, Vehicles have Driver, Passenger, Vehicle entry, Recall Vehicles and Recall Passengers, plus subloc-oriented permissions for its internal rooms.

A set of permissions can be grouped together into a "role", which makes it easier to assign them in bulk. This also isn't limited to a single permor.

The actual permissions can be one of these:

Public -- everyone has these permissions

Blacklist -- basically public but allows those with the Blacklister permission to blacklist particular users

Whitelist -- only the users approved by someone with the Whitelister role get the permission.

Private -- only the owner has access.

There's a special permission to change the mode, otherwise it's just something the owner does.

Claimed tiles can be moved -- either to an unclaimed tile (once per subloc per day) or swapped with a tile when someone with that permission allows it. There's some way of aggrrgating your worlds so you can do this effectively in case the parent world goes private or something.

Ownership

The owner has every permission and can't be blacklisted / is always on the whitelist. They can transfer ownership to another user, including remotely.

There's also a special permission that allows someone to add or remove blacklisters/Whitelisters.

Creation Engine (NIFE v6)

The creation engine is basically an upgraded version of NIFE, mixed with an upgraded version of XIFNET, mixed with Skein and a bunch of other resources in the various games I've made. I'm going to call it NIFE v6 to keep it a continuation of that project, but it does a lot more (and more efficiently too).

Instances of NIFE v6 are known as "Worlds". They have a physical presence on gtx0 on a claimed tile/room, being the only thing that occupies that room. They can't be placed on lakes, or on any tile in NIFE v6 that isn't claimable. And the world they're in has to allow claiming as well.

Initialization of a world

There are five big settings that are set when creating a World. I might cordon these out in a different way.

GTX0/Local -- determines whether a player brings in their GTX0 character (and GTX0 generation rules) or everything is local to the world itself. In the latter case, joining the world creates a new player character.

Handcrafted/Procedural -- Determines whether you're creating individual rooms/tiles (and what's in them) yourself or getting one of the procedural engines to do it for you. You can add handcrafted content to procedural areas and set limits on the engine, as well as have procedural subworlds inside a handcrafted one, so this is more of a big-picture idea of what you're creating. Something like a base should probably be handcrafted, but interestingly, it doesn't have to be.

World Shape -- Branched/2D/3D. Branched works better for mazes and maybe houses, while 2D and 3D are tiled. You can add links with a Branched layout to get it to resemble a tiled one, or portals to a tiled one to make it feel branched, or do whatever the hell you want with Subworlds, so again, this is more of a big picture thing.

Creator access -- public/blacklist/whitelist/private. Dictates the permissions system for who gets to work on the World with you, with private being default.

Play access -- public/blacklist/whitelist/private -- Who gets to join the world and how.

Some of these are way too complicated and need to be pared down. Also there should be a quirkable signup system that can influence parameters of character creation, and this thing can either require the owner/a grant to approve it or it can go through directly.

It might make sense to have different types, like "world", "maze", "hub area", "building" as well as a custom for anything where the settings are more mixed.

Additionally, there needs to be a setting for whether characters/etc are instanced or MMO. Mazes for example you'll want to be instanced from player to player, in which case there's JS storage. Otherwise it goes into a central database and uses GTX0 hooks. Also I'm not sure how multiplayer mazes work then. Needs a lot more work is what I'm saying.

A note on item obtaining

Procedural items check against the global diff database if MMO and the player character (or shared one) if local.

Handcrafted items are a bit more complicated (see: mazes). If MMO then what's in a room is dictated by the items database. If local then changes are probably getting stored some completely different way.

Prefab worlds

	Locality	Instancing	Generation	Shape	Creators	Access
Hub World	GTX0	Global	Procedural	2D/3D	public	public
Maze	Local	Local	Handcrafted	Branched	private	signup
Building	GTX0	Global	*	*	whitelist	whitelist

There's a lot of flaws in this approach.