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Section of the world map (2023-09)
A retro-styled shared world game: a cross between No Man's Sky and Jet Set Willy, and maybe a bit of Sabre Wulf.
An experiment in creating places, distinct environments which people can inhabit, make their own.
A game that encourages players to create traditions.
SURFACE is written in Rust, but I don't think you need Rust to run it. You can try this Linux binary which I haven't tested anywhere.
Sandbox games tend to have a single main character who's conceived as representing the player, who both explores the world and builds things in it. For offline games, this works well: your changes to the world are stored locally and you can revisit them when you like. However the question soon arises of how to share your creations with others, and there have been a few different approaches to this.
Let's look at these in the context of these questions:
Every action in the world is managed by the game servers, so all changes are permanent. The world operates independently of the play session, so the game can't offer any kind of restore function. New and returning characters must navigate the world as it now is.
Characters may explore the world without reporting back to the game servers. Their actions are not visible to other players until they upload/sync changes. Restore points are available. In the case of No Man's Sky there is a further distinction between characters/saves and players/Steam accounts - interventions performed by one save are not visible to other saves on the same account.
Only the owner of the world is permitted to make changes, so they can decide when to sync with a central server, the only reason to do it is to invite others to see them.
Caveat: I need to play more games which allow friends to share building activities because I am certain they exist.
But it appears there is a fundamental incompatibility between having a shared world and having leeway to perform activities offline. NMS is probably unusual in being a shared-world game that even attempts to offer conveniences like save states.
My approach is a bit different. The reason people want saves and restore points is that they identify with the specific character they are playing. They've built it up over many hours of gameplay, so of course they will want to protect it against misfortune (restore points) or take shortcuts for gain (save scumming)
SURFACE is a shared world game that invites players to develop and identify with a way of doing things, rather than a single character. Players will be rewarded, not by seeing their character survive indefinitely, but by seeing their characters die happy.
On the level of a shared world, characters themselves are invisible. Players decide to share the achievements of their characters as they would a creative work, by presenting it as an artifact - a culture - which others can download and experience.
Procedural generation can supply an endlessly varied - yet shared - environment for players. New places that people can explore, mould, make their own. You could call it a reaction to the enclosure of the mainstream Web, but unlike the historical enclosures, we don't need to live in the space that's been taken from us: there are limitless new lands to inhabit.
