Game Projects

Basic Stuff

2D zelda 1 clone, with some minecraft elements and a heck of a lot of Shatterloop influence.

2D with fixed "rooms" similar to zelda 1 or Drillr. The environment is *mostly* manipulable except for the bedrock that gates areas off or terrain you need specific Artifacts to bypass.

Has semi-handcrafted enemies (known as Eldrits) and weapons, however their actual distribution and room content in general is procedurally generated. There's some procgen here but it's not total, and idk what the distribution is. There's something approximating bosses in the dungeons.

Has dungeons and Caverns in a "Void" plane along with your House. There's additionally Fire, Water, Wood, Earth, and Wind planes that towns exist in. Both the dungeons/caverns and towns have entrances in the Overworld and the towns are also linked to each other though a lot of those chains are broken and need to be repaired at the farther end. These planes are traversable with the right equipment (aside from the Wood plane which is pretty friendly) and have unique resources that can be mined with the right equipment.

Your House is fully manipulable, however you can't mess with the walls since they're keeping the void out or build other enclosures. You can leave via the Airlock, however this isn't recommended without a Voidsuit.

You can create 2-way portals to your house from anywhere in the overworld, or use one-way town transports (or pay to make them two-way). You have a limited amount of Portals you can put down however.

Dungeons are key-puzzlers very very similar to Zelda 1 or deep castle layouts. Each dungeon has an Artifact, a Boss, and a Quantum Node. There should be ~8 dungeons or whatever makes sense. Artifacts do various things with you concerning terrain or with terrain and there are areas scattered throughout the overworld where you can also use them to collect Quantum Shards, Vits, or other useful items.

Caverns use other generation and contain various useful things.

Both Caverns and Dungeons contain Eldrits.

Eldrits occasionally drop Eldrit materials, which are animal products.

Towns have some kind of basic economy going, which you can interact with via resources and interesting items you find, and then buy various things. You can also do Work out in the plane and get some kind of solid wage, helping the town in the process. Or maybe deliver stuff around as a Courier.

The reason it's called Minds is because you're not some weird adventurer that has to save the world, you're this amalgamation of various people (with various proficiencies and knowledges) in an immortal body that's basically the last hope of the dying civilization here. More on this in the Lore section. In your House there's a Fixture that lets you switch out your distribution of different Minds, giving you proficiencies in various tasks. You can talk to various people in the world and potentially add their Mind to the database for money. Your efficiency or luck in various tasks is dictated by the Minds contained within you. You start with some decent ones, but finding more in the towns is important.

I have a decent amount of Lore built out already.

Concept Scope

The basic idea here is a procgen zelda 1 + minecraft clone. It'll probably be a medium-sized project but the scope is limited and it's tightly wrapped around the Lore. There's no story outside the Lore, either you (and other players) succeed or the civilization is doomed.

This one's a bit different because there's a limited amount of Seeds (100?) and players must complete all of them in order for the civilization to fully escape. You're kinda outside time and can replay seeds, but that particular section of the civilization will escape as long as one player completes it.

I'm not sure how to validate seeds being completed. This will definitely take work. Seed completion is stored on the server, and if all seeds are completed, additional lore gets unlocked for everyone -- it goes to an entirely separate subdomain.

Basic Lore

The civilization here is very definitely dying. They had the usual fall-from-high-technology that dodecaverse civilizations go through, however this universe has a bunch of additional problems that are making it impossible to regain a foothold:

The self-illuminating band failed. The overworld is completely dark, though things are visible and plants can grow by virtue of virtual photons in the weird quantum landscape. These can't be exploited to use as energy or create new matter, however, so the conical ark has largely evaporated and can't be replenished. The world size therefore is fixed.

The overworld is being torn apart by quantum forces. Planes are reasonably safe but they each have their own issues and can't by themselves sustain human life. These quantum forces have accelerated animal evolution, so the wild animals of this world (and all those kept domesticated by the civilization that used to exist in the overworld) have become horrible mutants known as Eldrits. Similar to the Shatterloop lore in a lot of ways, except a lot worse.

The Planes each have resources that self-replenish over time, and these are useful to keep some kind of Civilization alive, however other things fail in the wrong environment, so there's this spot in the overworld guarded by a Quantum Node and human presence where the Hub Cities of each plane connect via portals, allowing goods to flow through. This spot is known as The Nexus, and if it falls humanity is doomed. The Quantum Node protects it from Quantum forces, however it also attracts Eldrits, so there's a constant war going on here.

Human reproduction doesn't work and immortality decays without an influx of Statisite (found in the Void plane). The Void Plane is unusually hard to mine and extremely hostile to people. People tend to resurrect in Void Complexes (like your House) which helps some, except this place is not livable for normal humans and they lose whatever they were carrying. You're an exception since you're not fully human -- more of a planar being.

Overall, this civilization is definitely going to die out here as the Overworld gets ripped apart and planes can therefore no longer connect with each other. The last hope of the civilization is gathering the Quantum Nodes together and using them to form a Singularity to escape to a new universe.

Quantum Nodes

Quantum Nodes are entities of Stability that make them protective against the quantum forces wreaking havoc on the Overworld. The old Overworld Civilization (not to be confused with the original post-dodecaverse Civilization that they came from) kept them in complexes scattered around the center of the Conical Ark -- a last ditch effort to keep the world intact. It failed obviously but their presence is at least maintaining the integrity of the Overworld for now, though this seems to be slowly failing too.

They and the complexes actually exist in the Void plane, so idk how that fits into the lore above.

Unfortunately, their Stability attract Eldrits, who have congregated inside the complexes housing them. Sending armies to retake them isn't viable because the Quantum Node + Void (where they are) combination keeps normal people from resurrecting, and they're definitely going to die here. A couple attempts have been made, but The Silver (the ruling body basically) have decided against more of this loss of life. Instead, they went with the Minds project.

The Minds Project

This project's goal was to create a kind of humanoid golem out of planar materials that could resurrect even in the quantum node environments. This entity would have a human mind encapsulated in each of its planar bodies -- so 5 in total, which is your limit. The void body is a bit diferent. The planar construction of these Minds would keep them intact on resurrection, or something like that. You yourself are conscious but who you are is kinda spread out across those 6 intelligences, who aren't conscious in themselves. The Silver chose themselves as the 6 minds for you.

You were to be the commander of an army of these planar beings (known as The Gold), with Bronze minds in the other ones. However something went horribly wrong and the resources were spent so now it's exclusively up to you. I'm thinking maybe they used the Quantum Node in the Nexus to build you, but building you destroyed it, so they couldn't create additional Gold, and now The Nexus is in jeopardy as well -- they gathered Quantum Shards there to at least make it sorta kinda stable, but it isn't going to be strong enough and will fail eventually. Then maybe there was a revolution and the old Silver got largely cut from that kind of power, so you're very definitely on your own, and while some people support your cause they still have to live so that's why they charge you money and stuff.

So yeah you're kinda the hero and definitely immortal but it's complicated. People kinda accept that you have to be able to get to dungeons to get Quantum Nodes and stuff, but the society isn't really united like it was -- the Silver lack the societal power they once had and people are pretty mistrustful of authorities in general, though they'll definitely give you discounts and whatnot if they support the Cause.

This means that when you collect your first Quantum Node, you could bring it back to The Nexus to stabilize it. This is probably a Story point. The Nexus itself doesn't connect to any of the towns, so you can't just bypass the whole metroidvania thing, it's instead a conduit for various Portal connections.

Resurrection Technology

Resurrection Technology is kinda key to the whole Lore here.

Essentially, people have something called an Astral -- this is a vessel that can contain memory/mind/consciousness. When one Astral dissipates, the consciousness will naturally go into the next one or if one doesn't exist it'll go Elsewhere. Astrals can be contained within biological humans (and are by default), or technological constructs, or in this particular world's case, planar constructs. Scattered around the Void are complexes that contain Astrals contained in these planar constructs with also cloning vats that create bodies. If you die, your Astral dissipates, and you swap over to your Astral here, which gets cloned into a clone body, and then you resurrect.

In this universe, Astrals outside of the biological ones have to be stored in the Void, otherwise they'll slowly get altered by the plane makeup (or quantum fluctuations in the case of the Overworld). If you die in the presence of a Quantum Node, your biological Astral will change and you won't be able to reconnect with the other Astral. So being around the Quantum Node in The Nexus is somewhat terrifying, and using it to create potentially dangerous planar golems is the seed for a good old fashioned revolution. The people guarding The Nexus keep their distance from it when fighting Eldrits so they can still resurrect, and it's vitally important to not let Eldrits within the boundary where the people here can't resurrect, at all costs.

One issue with the Void is that planar constructs slowly dissipate. I mean everything does -- heat, light, etc too. It's Stable, but it's also Dead. Since Astrals are built on planar constructs and have to be stored here, they need a steady supply of Statisite to stay intact, as do the various planar machines to keep them from malfunctioning.

Essentially, when planar materials are in the presence of Stasisite, the Stasisite will dissipate instead. Stasisite naturally forms out in the Void -- it's basically where all the dissipated energy goes so it's kinda renewable, however traversing The Void is kinda dangerous because of that whole energy dissipation thing. Voidsuits are designed to get around this and work basically like spacesuits. Whatever planar machines you bring with you are either going to slowly get broken or need to be surrounded by Stasisite themselves, which makes mining the stuff kinda hard since you need it to keep mining and it's kinda hard to find.

In any case, you're exempt from the Quantum Node thing. The reason is complicated, but basically each of your six planar bodies contain their own Astral, they share your memories/consciousness and they resurrect individually. Fluctuations from the Quantum Node that would affect any of the individual Astrals instead get transferred to the Void Astral, which dies completely on your death.

When the other Astrals resurrect, a new Void Astral is created, and then the whole complex is transferred to a new biological body.

To prevent the Silver themselves from resurrecting in you (or vice-versa), the Void Silver mixed his mind with the other 5 minds to create new people in each case. So no part of you is really any particular Silver, though there's a lot of similarities for sure.

Planes

Planes are essentially regions that are all composed of a single process or element or something, known as a Planar Contour. If left to its own devices, a Plane will eventually consume everything in it, transforming it to that particular Contour. If you mine things from the Plane, it'll eventually regrow.

There are six planes, with various uses:

Void -- Used to harvest Stasisite and also contains Newflesh Nodes for resurrection purposes. Stasisite is useful elsewhere, mostly to keep things from turning into Planar Contours. The various town outer walls are built from Stasisite alloys that connect to a Stasisite stockpile (known as a "Stack") somewhere -- essentially the Stack will get depleted slowly rather than the entire town crumbling away into nothing. These stacks are quite large, though the Silver of the area definitely likes keeping it topped off. But even outside of the immortality thing, if the civilization can't reach the Void again, the cities in other Planes will eventually crumble away into Planar Contours.

Fire -- Literally fire. The materials here make useful sources of heat and light that do exhaust themselves eventually.

Wind -- The Wind Plane is entirely made up of breathable air. The concentrated materials will emit air until they dissipate completely, so these are kinda essential to making cities livable, and allowing people in some type of suit to still breathe.

Water -- Should also be self-explanatory. While cities recycle water, you'll definitely need to bring some into the Overworld, to keep suits humid, etc. Additionally, Crops can't grow without it, and the Wood dimension is kinda weird because the native plants don't require it.

Earth -- Full of rocks and metals. A more diverse plane for sure, but the materials here are in wide use.

Wood -- Probably the weirdest plane. Tons and tons of plants everywhere, growing around each other with bubbles of various sizes that contain a mixture of carbon dioxide and oxygen. The air's breathable but somewhat unpleasant -- the plants produce oxygen but carbon dioxide also spontaneously forms in the bubbles. The native plants here don't seem to require or be composed of water, but they don't seem to grow so much as form so I guess this makes sense. Burning the plants here produces pure carbon dioxide -- no water. Given this, they're also inedible and toxic as hell. Basically like trying to eat very fibrous charcoal. Crops can be grown here and have unusually high vitality and yield, however they do actually need water in order to be useful to humans -- if you fail to provide it, they'll instead form out of pure carbon dioxide and be the same toxic stuff as everything else. They don't require light however.

The Wood plane is probably the most useful to Civilization, however it requires a constant source of water -- this can't just be recycled because water will slowly contour into carbon dioxide and/or plants. Inside the Cities, you could recycle water, but the Stasisite walls prevent the lack of requirement for light (as well as impacting the vitality and yield buffs). You can illuminate them with fire materials, but then you're reliant on that plane. This is also irrelevant when the Stasisite walls eventually fail -- the city would eventually become this big bubble surrounded by plants and any Crops grown within would become toxic charcoal. Also everyone would dehydrate due to water Countouring. Overall, bad way to go.

Transferring the entire civilization to the Void plane makes the most sense, as you could continue to farm Stasisite. You could recycle water and materials. However, your Crops need a source of light, and this can't be recycled forever as it'll eventually bleed out via entropy. So the Void plane is dependent on the fire plane if nothing else.

Here's a breakdown of what each plane requires at its bare minimum for human survival:

Void -- needs the Fire plane.

Wood -- needs the Void plane and either the Water plane or Fire plane.

Fire -- needs the Void plane.

Water -- needs the Void plane and the Fire plane.

Wind -- needs the Void plane and the Fire plane.

Earth -- needs the Void plane and the Fire plane.

As you can see, the Void plane and Fire plane are pretty essential, however they need each other in order for humanity to survive. The other planes aren't required for bare minimum human survival, but are essential to the size and scope of the current Civilization. In any case, if the Overworld is destroyed outright humanity is doomed. If The Nexus falls, people could still transfer stuff more manually, though this would cripple the civilization and would eventually lead to humanity's doom whenever those roads became inaccessible or eventually when the overworld itself gets destroyed.

Given all this, moving universes is really the only viable solution. Either that or finding some way to keep the Overworld from falling apart.

Armageddon Timeline

Let's say the entire Civilization plays the armageddon game optimally and events happen naturally. Here's a timeline of how humanity in this universe goes extinct:

Resources are diverted to protect the Nexus as much as possible, and a massive effort is underway to transfer civilization to the Void and stockpile resources there. There's also a massive effort to ramp up mining in the Fire plane. The materials needed for these endeavors are going to come from the Earth plane (for metals needed to create cities) and the Wind plane (oxygen for traversing the Void to mine stasisite and build cities here). Crops continue to be grown in the Wood plane (powered by the Water plane), but there isn't focus to expand in either context. There needs to be extra water to support recycling aims but that's a small goal really. So most of the manpower in the water and wood plane get diverted and civilization there exists only for maintenance.

As the Overworld starts to crumble more and more, more Eldrits get attracted to the Nexus's Quantum Node as the source of stability. They become harder and harder to defeat given the massive quantum fluctuations. Eventually, they overwhelm the defenders and breach the walls. They claim the Quantum Node and destroy the Nexus. The defenders revive but are unable to retake it without dying permanently, so the Nexus is abandoned.

The planes are now separated from each other, however the overworld is still somewhat viable -- there is however the issue of traversing an overworld filled with highly challenging Eldrits to build new portal networks. No matter, they can just resurrect. The civilization here will have some challenges for sure, but they can maintain new portal networks against quantum fluctuations and Eldrit attacks, maybe decentralizing them to fortify them minimally.

Meanwhile, the humans have been hard at work -- there's a huge Void city with a giant stockpile of Stasisite and highly refined and dense fire crystals. The civilization in the fire plane has expanded to mine and transfer fire resources as effectively as possible. The wind plane civilization has been scaled back a lot -- the Void city is big enough for Civilization, it just needs enough room to accomodate whatever crystals the fire plane puts out. Same deal with the earth plane's metal contribution -- just enough to expand the fire crystal and stasisite stockpiles and basic maintenance. Everyone's thinking over the very long term here (which would never happen in a real-world scenario, but w/e). All manpower is optimized, so adding extra metal to the processes isn't going to help, the earth plane is exclusively in maintenance mode, outside of expanding the Void civilization incrementally as more fire resources and stasisite accumulate. The water and wood planes have been in maintenance mode for a while -- the wood plane is still the least manpower/fire-resource-intensive way of maintaining food supply, which are the two long-term currencies here.

More time passes, and eventually the portal networks become too difficult to maintain -- the eldrits are much much harder and smarter, or portals themselves are beginning to fail, or there are other issues. People can still carry resources manually, though this is very slow going. They can resurrect indefinitely though. More manpower is needed to ferry materials, so at this stage it makes sense to scale back the Void plane to maintenance to support this -- Stasisite production can resume when the Civilization enters the Void -- the stockpiling is really only done to make the civilization survive later on when mining it is more difficult. Here it's well accepted that the overworld will fall pretty soon, so the most important thing is mining and ferrying as much fire material as possible and maintaining everything.

So given this, the wind plane is abandoned, since it was really only useful for expanding the void plane. The current stocks of oxygen are enough to support easy mining and building maintenance for some time. The void plane is also scaled back to maintenance -- everything is devoted into mining and ferrying fire materials, outside of basic maintenance tasks.

Over time, the ferrying gets even harder -- Eldrits are much more difficult to deal with, and the quantum fluctuations are getting bad. It starts to make sense to abandon the wood and water planes and grow crops in the fire plane with recycled water -- it has lower yields here but the manpower increase from those planes is vital and there's also a manpower yield from no longer transporting materials to and from those planes.

So now the only places that have people are the Fire plane (for fire material mining and transport, as well as Crop generation and transport), the Earth Plane (providing metal for basic maintenance purposes in the fire and void planes) and the Void plane (maintaining the ever-growing stockpile of fire materials).

Transport becomes increasingly difficult again, and it makes sense to start growing Crops in the Void plane -- this uses fire materials, but the extra manpower that aren't delivering crops are delivering fire materials so it's a net boon.

Finally, and abruptly, the Overworld collapses. Whoever was in it loses whatever they were carrying and respawns in the Void plane. So there are now three planes that are permanently separated from each other -- the void plane (which has a minimal number of people -- needed for basic maintenance and travellers who died), the fire plane (where most of the population is), and the earth plane (minimal and maintenance-based). The fire plane and void plane are both self-sustaining on crops, the earth plane is not. There are however crops available and plenty of fire materials as they're used for mining metal.

The earth plane quits mining and devotes all fire materials to growing crops for their own survival. They didn't plan for this though, so eventually the fire runs out, the crops die, and they starve to death, resurrecting in the Void plane.

The fire plane lasts a lot longer. Mining the fire materials no longer makes sense, and they have massive stockpiles to feed their crops. Eventually though, the stasisite stockpiles run out, the walls collapse, and fire breaches everything, and they get incinerated/contoured to death. They resurrect in the Void plane.

The Void plane has two major decisions to make, the second of which is the bigger one. Is manpower or human longevity more important? In the case of the maintenance crew at the earth plane resurrecting, they go with manpower -- it's important to mine stasisite as long as possible so those people are allowed to resurrect. The fire plane is way trickier -- they have a big bulk of population, which means more mouths to feed, which means the fire material stockpile will run out faster. However they'd be able to aid in stasisite retrieval. Since the fire plane people aren't going to all die at once, they find the optimum point, and maybe 20-30% of those people resurrect, with the rest permanently dead.

The entire civilization is now in the Void plane. Their main concern is mining as much Stasisite as possible, however eventually the Voidsuits are too irreparable or the oxygen supplies are too low. Let's say however that they've managed to isolate spots where it respawns, so they could theoretically go out and push it back, dying in the process. It might make sense to use fire crystals, depending on whether that is a better use than powering crops needed to sustain newflesh nodes. Eventually at some point, retrieving Stasisite no longer makes sense.

Now that there's only one optimum solution left -- expending as little energy as possible so the Crops don't have to be powered as much, starvation, and potential depopulation, the humans wake from their optimization slumber and the Civilization falls violently. What's left of it has one goal -- continue farming crops by fire material light, which will definitely run out before the Stasisite does. Fire materals and Crops are so valuable that factions seize them. Astral homes get claimed or destroyed, so some people die permanently while immortal elites that control the fire rise up. They use fire crystals frivolously because they can, while the people under them are cold and miserable, fighting for scraps.

Over time the civilization falls ever more from grace. The source of factional power dissipates, with the people rising up and overthrowing the elites, claiming the ever-dwindling piles of fire materials to grow crops and feel warmth again. Elite factions are replaced by petty gangs that go to war over small stockpiles. These gangs are fewer in number and the number of people in them is low, so they're more egalitarian. They live in squalid conditions, sleeping with their crops or laying claim to closets and whatever else offers some degree of fortification. Eventually the fire materials of one group dries up, and they go to war for more but are outcompeted and enslaved or die.

Now, near the end, gangs have starving slaves that they send to war -- get a fire material and you can eat. The gang leaders hoard their piles and crops. Everyone is some degree of cold and starving, but the slaves have the worst of it. Eventually they'll perish and the gang leaders will have to fight their own wars, or become slaves in the process.

At the last, there's one gang left that had some highly fortified space and always an army of slaves at their beck and call. They were even decently fed, with the gang leaders getting fat. Something like a small civilization existed here, spreading out into the smaller gangs to conquer them and steal their crystals. But at last, they're all that's left. There are no more wars, and no more fire crystals elsewhere either. Sure, sometimes a slave will go out along the empty corridors and find one stashed away somewhere and be greatly rewarded, but usually there's nothing.

With nothing coming in hardly ever, that last gang gets increasingly paranoid about their fire material supply and their crops. They start starving their slaves again. The slaves, who go out on long cold starving adventures into the ruins of the Void city are tired of this. They revolt, overthrow the gang leaders and claim the remaining fire materials and crops, wanting only to survive.

Over time, this breaks apart as the civilization did into gangs, but they're so much fewer and smaller in number now, just a couple friends full of infighting that run out of crystals and go brutally attack their neighbors for more (or for crops). At this point, even slaves don't make sense, there's just not enough people to go around. People fight, someone dies, and the fighters have crops to last another span of time.

Eventually there's nothing but a few bloodied fighters left. They keep their distance -- knowing the danger of each other. But eventually they run out of fire material and their crops fail and they go to see who's the toughest kid on the block.

Eventually there's just one person left. Haggard, they've fought off all others, but are always paranoid that there's more to steal their well-hidden crypt of fire materials. They've killed everyone around them too, and they had so many slaves in that era. But those times are long past.

When their crystals run out, they wander -- looking for crops, looking for fire materials. Sometimes they find them but usually don't. Their time is running out, and what did it all mean anyway? They eventually starve or die some other way.

So yeah tl;dr you're kinda super important to this whole universe's survival.