Motleyverse(?)

Screengrab of a Minecraft-like game GitHub

MVP Progress 10%

This is an attempt to

Broadly the goal is a game playable in browser built off of webgl, no download necessary, playable on- or off-line. Each player would start off in a standardish world, using typical survival and/or/Minecraft mechanics to collect items, build things creatively, maintain health & satiety.

Probably should rename because I like the name Motli better

Like Minecraft but with some things improved

Broadly I think the differences I'm imagining are those based on a greater emphasis on diegetic gameplay. Diegetic gameplay elements are those that are in-universe, from the point of the player-character instead of out-of-universe. Menus are not diegetic (most of the time), they are ways that a real human has of interfacing with an in-game notion. For reasons that I haven't really thought through, I think its neat when things like menus are minimized.

Universe & Portals

At a medium age of technological advancement, the player can start to construct portals to other worlds in the universe. At an advanced age, the player can construct other universes undergirded by different rules, and can construct portals to other universes created by other users (and can open up their own universe for extra-universe access).

Basically the idea here is to try and make more concepts around the game diegetic, following from internal game rules, so connecting to a shared server works by opening up the game and then finding your portal to the shared portal. A "Creative" world can be an alternative universe that you can bring plans in from. "Joining a server" means building

Mods

Building a new universe should take in building blocks, and those building blocks can be mods. You should be able to build a computer in-game and build a mod in a simple IDE in that in-game computer and burn it onto a universal building block and install it in a new universe.

Planning & Large-Scale Construction

I'm interested in some sort of "blueprint" mode where you can design out buildings without requiring materials, and then you could, using that blueprint, recruit a number of workers to help with the construction and/or do some time magic to fast-forward your local time to watch the construction take place.

Free cam

Being able to view projects easily from a variety of angles helps when constructing things that you want to look pretty, I was imagining either possessing a bird or building a drone for access to view angles in a limited area around the player and limited interactability.

Magic

Always gotta have magic, but not make it overpowered. The basic idea for the starting universe is one that looks like our own, so no telekinesis, no transmogrification. But enchanting to get bonus points or doing things like possessing animals? Might be good? Enchanting specifically I think should require unravelling certain rules undergirding the universe by solving puzzles in ruins, and be somewhat deterministic. Ideally there are different sorts of universes, requiring crystals or plants or words or drawings. Portal creation should be a straightforward type of enchanting/one which has a lot of clues. It shouldn't just be "put some mineral into a table and get a random output".

Trading

I'm not convinced there should be trading? Or the economy should at least be quite different from Minecraft. Villages have expertise in some resources and require some resources, modifying the village hurts your relationship with the village, traveling merchants can try and find you villages with the desired resources?

Communitarianism

I also wanted to explore the notion of a game where to a certain extent you are not the main player? Which is a bit difficult to do. But games, stories, movies are works of art that almost always follow a protagonist or group of protagonists accomplishing a goal, in a way which echoes the "Great Man" theory of history that I basically think is fundamentally wrong and a bit immoral, reifying notions of hierarchy that are maybe necessary for personal understanding but not actually necessary for global achievement. So like: success should be measured not by a victory of one party over another, but a global flourishing? Thinking of things like minecraft, factorio, satisfactory deriving points from maximizing the degree to which you exploit the resources of the natural world, I wanted to explore notions of a non-exploitative, non-hierarchical game? Ideas here are:

Learning Stuff

This is kind of just my usual strategy but: I tried to build this from the ground up without a game engine, just relying on WebGL and React. I think the notion of a WebGL game with a React UI layered on top has a lot of legs and a lot of technically achievable performance!