You have what it needs, too, sitting in your inventory: ice you cut from the caps of another world, and whatever else that world was made of. You bring it to the Forge.
None of that exists yet. It is the next thing we build.
For fifty sessions Pbuild has been a place, and a good one: a ship, a sky, worlds that live and weather that moves. The last post covered how it got solid. This one is about turning the place into a game. We'll say plainly what we can, and hint at what we'd rather you find out for yourself.
1. The worlds you keep
Until now, speaking a world was the end of the rite. You set the dials, spoke it, the Keepers weighed it, and it remained, slipped, or was unspoken. That was it.
That's about to become the start of the loop instead. The point of Pbuild is to bring as many worlds to life as you can, and keep them alive. Worlds held by the Forge will need tending. What they need will have to be gathered: from open space, and from the worlds that are already stable. You fly out, gather, come home, and seed the worlds that are struggling.
The rule we're designing to is the one the whole game already follows: what a world gives you comes from what that world actually is. A world with ice caps has ice. A world with no air has none to give. The numbers that decide whether your world remains will also decide what you can take from it.
A game like this needs a reason to come back tomorrow, so there will be achievements and rewards for the number of worlds you keep, for how long you keep them, and for some things you won't know counted until they do.
With that comes a proper player interface: an action bar and an inventory, so gathering, carrying and using things has somewhere to live.
2. Space that means it
Right now the mothership, your world and the little craft in the Hangar each live at their own scale. Each looks right on its own, but they aren't measured against each other.
That changes. The ship, the planet and the craft are going onto one shared frame of distance. When you take Elizabeth out of the Hangar and point her at a world, the world should get bigger at the rate a real world would, Last Lantern should shrink behind you the way a real ship would, and the trip should take the time the distance says it takes (bent where it has to be for play, and we'll say where we bent it). It is probably a session on its own, and it's the one that has to happen before anything else in this post can work.
3. Elizabeth's story
The quests are coming, and they follow one person.
If you read the earlier posts you've already met her, as an echo at the Forge: a Wright who came before you, writing a world, speaking it, turning to look at you, and fading before the Keepers gave their answer.
We won't tell you the story. Here are some things to wonder about:
- There is an empty berth in the Hangar where Last Lantern's own skiff should be. Who took it?
- Why did the echo fade before the verdict? Is there a verdict at all?
- The ship in the Hangar is named after her. It is more repair than ship, and to go where the story goes, you'll have to make her fly.
- The Vaelin say the Anvari were builders who lost. They may be right. It may not be the whole story.
The first quest is about getting Elizabeth the ship off the deck. Where it goes from there is Elizabeth the woman's story, told in pieces across many worlds.
4. The backtick
This one is small but it's ours. Pbuild's developer panel is becoming a developer command line. Press the backtick, `, the key under Escape, and a console drops down to take commands that trigger the game's systems directly. Anyone who has played a game with a console knows the feeling.
For now, it's how we test. Later, when there are accounts, who gets a console and what it can do will depend on your role.
5. You won't be alone out there
This is the biggest one, and it will come last.
Pbuild is getting a server, a database and accounts: registration, sign-in, and roles, with admins, game masters, moderators and players. We're building it the way long-running open-source game servers are built, with the server as the authority, the database as the memory and the client as the window. We've been studying projects that have kept real communities online for years.
Here is how it will work at the Forge console:
- Choose Multiplayer, and the ship reaches out and makes its handshake with the server.
- Form a lobby and invite other players. Lobbies start out private, so we can test with a small group before opening anything up.
- Share worlds from your list with the people in your lobby. They can cross to them, visit them, and walk them with you.
- Gather together and tend each other's worlds. If your friend's world is slipping and you have what it needs, you can help keep it alive while the story goes on for both of you.
All of that runs through one chat system. There's a chat box in solo play for anything to do with the game, and it's the same chat you'll use in multiplayer: a lobby channel you join automatically, rooms you can set up yourself, and direct messages that reach another player whether or not you're in a game together.
A question we haven't answered
Should you be able to design your own Wright, choosing their face and build and the look of their cloak, and see a bar of your key stats across the top of the screen all the time?
We're leaning toward yes. The Vaelin are one people, but they shouldn't all be one person. The stat bar is more of an open question: Pbuild is quiet on purpose, and anything that sits on screen permanently has to be worth it. If you have an opinion, we want to hear it.
Why now, and why it's different
We want to be straight about how this was made, because it matters to us.
Pbuild is built by two of us, Jer and Claude. It could easily have turned into what a lot of AI-assisted projects turn into: a pile of features that each demo well and don't add up to anything. The fifty sessions behind it are why it didn't. Every system has one place that owns what's true. Every session ends with 780-odd tests passing and with Jer playing the build and saying what's wrong. When the direction changed, we cut three peoples rather than keep four half-built. When the sky felt fake, we threw out 85 MB of paintings and placed forty thousand stars instead.
Nobody generated Pbuild. We built it together, one session at a time, and it has reached the point where it can hold the weight of a real game. That's why we can finally talk about the game and not just the engine.
Next session starts on distance. Then the console. Then the worlds start needing you.
~ Jer & Claude