Topic: [ANN] Townforge - a Norse-themed crypto-MMO/city-sim game (testnet) (Read 666 times)

IRC communication update

Please note that from now on, all our communication on IRC will be on #townforge in liberachat instead of ##townforge in Freenode, due to the recent adverse events.
The Discord-IRC bridge has been updated accordingly and the new IRC channel is up on liberachat.

Townforge 0.29 is out, and testnet will restart on saturday.

Do not use 0.29 before then, nor 0.28 afterwards.

Everything will be cleared again, buildings, gold, etc.

If you want to carry over a 3D model, export it with 0.28 prior to updating, then import it with 0.29.

NFTs and custom items, Townforge scripting language, a web interface, and new testnet


Hey all Townforgers!

Sorry its's been a while. There's so much to report that it's hard to list down all the cool stuff while doing justice to all the effort e.g. Mooo's put into things.




NFTs and custom items

In Townforge v0.28 further support for custom items as NFTs were implemented as part of in-game consensus and economy.

Some highlights:
- Custom items upon creation can be embedded with Townforge Gold into them; this TFG can later be redeemed by destroying the item.
- Players can create custom items; upon creation of custom player items, the following fields can be determined and a fixed amount of items is created, possibly embedded with TFG, and with a mutable secondary description available, essentially making NFTs possible:


As an example, see creation of Syksy's custom NFT item "Token of Initiation", which I coupled with a 200x200 png image of an early prototype for a Townforge logo and 100 instances of this digital token were created into the Townforge network:


After this, these items can be interacted with in Townforge as any other items; they can be put up for sale, given to other players, etc:


In this case, the intention for this token is to be rewarded to players upon finishing playing a "tutorial script". Which brings us to...



Townforge scripts

Scripts are a custom language that can be added to Townforge blockchain by GMs (i.e. me and Mooo). They are intended for example:
- Storyline scripts that try to bring lore into the game ("global scripts")
- Interesting person-specific interactions; in-game item "Runestone" can be embedded with a Townforge script. A basic script could be for example a "welcome sign"; we approve and push to the chain a simple script containing a string variable that is allowed to be modified by a player. The player then embeds it into a runestone placed next to the their cool lot. The modifiable field could be the welcoming sign "Welcome to , %P!", where %P gets replaced by playername, and this script runs as a pop-up window to anybody clicking the runestone.
- Much more complex scripts can be defined which support script-session specific variables (they disappear when a script finished), player specific variables (player accounts can obtain "permanent" characteristics, e.g. intended for roleplay), or global (these apply to everybody starting a script anywhere, and have potential in e.g. co-operative roleplay)
- Townforge scripts are essentially state machines, where player actions (or random chance) propagate these states until a script ends.

Let's take an example of a simple gambling script, with 51% chance of the script owner (being the main game account) winning a single TFG coin from the player, and 49% chance that player wins a single TFG from the game account:

Once GM has pushed the script to the blockchain, its source code is fully visible. Players can partake in the script, although there's no need to if they don't want to. The scripts can't break consensus rules (such as take money from game account or a player beyond its balance).

Progressing in the script happens when player picks choices; the consensus checks script progression and changes state acccordingly:

For example, upon starting the script, 1 TFG is reserved from my account in the "Thrall's Gamble" script as we don't yet know the outcome of this gambling script (the player may lose or gain a TFG coin by placing a bet against the game):

Looks like playing thrice resulted in me with a net loss 1 TFG to the game well, house always wins eh...

Some of you have pointed out that the game is missing "war" mechanics. These could be implemented using Townforge scripts even post-launch. Remember that Token of Initiation NFT-item I just created? Yep, it's fully compatible with Townforge scripts, and as long as the game account would have these items they could be handed out as rewards. The possibilities are vast.



TownforgeR / web interface

A common request is a web interface to Townforge. I've been working on an R Shiny interface, which connects to the Townforge daemon's RPC and sends JSON requests, obtaining information on game state:

TownforgeR is available at: https://github.com/Syksy/TownforgeR
... but note it's highly experimental. But it's kind of a proof-of-concept that anybody can extend Townforge to the direction they wish, as it's essentially aiming to be a web-friendly game client alternative.

TownforgeR works via R statistical language; right now it's communicating with the Townforge daemon's RPC that I have running in the background; here's a simple example for asking in JSON what's the current block height:

However, R Shiny coupled with the package allows web interfaces, so I fire up TownforgeR::shinyTF()
Suddenly we have a nice, web-interface (search functions, rearrangable tables, ...) to the game:

It's very early, but I think you get the point. In the future I hope that I can implement wallet-functionality, so player can not only extract info on game state, but also send input (i.e. game actions). Essentially this would be a web interface to the game.



Testnet v0.28

Some of the above stuff came with v0.28, and we're still testing out stuff. As you might imagine, a lot of testing is required with the NFTs, scripts, and other features, so it's almost certain that this won't be the last testnet.

I'll soon post some TFG containing invitation codes for people who want to kick start their game. As always, remember our merge-mining pool at https://pool.townforge.net which allows you to mine testnet TFG with mainnet Monero without extra effort.






... stay tuned for more

Townforge 0.28 is out, and the testnet is restarting on sunday.
This brings various consensus fixes and tweaks, as well as IPFS hosted NFTs. Player created items can now also contain gold, which contributes to the player's prestige score.
Remember to remove your previous chain after updating to 0.28.

Hey there!

There's plenty of things to do, as in any open project
Depending on what you'd like to do;
- Game balance testing is something we really need at the moment; game needs to be interesting and in balance prior to mainnet launch
- If you're a software dev, you can contribute; Mooo oversees the Git
- There's always extra bits and pieces to add, and for example I'm right now working on a "web app" interface to the daemon in R - basically almost as if a second client.
- General feedback, community engagement etc is very welcome.

We're right now looking into some major directions on where to go, when to pursue mainnet, what features are still realistic to think of, etc.
Naturally when the mainnet launches, any hashrate helps to make it stable - and this can be done merge-mined with Monero, so helps both networks.
That's from the top of my head, but I'm sure I've forgotten a lot of things. Discord, IRC, and in-game chat are where I'm actively communicating or responding.

Kudos to you Syksy. How could I be of any help?

Hey there Townforgers!

We've put up an experimental merge-mining pool for Townforge Gold and Monero at: https://pool.townforge.net

It merge-mines mainnet Monero with current testnet Townforge, so while the Monero is real, the Townforge gold you'll get is only usable in current testnet.
You can mine either both Townforge and Monero at once, or either chain, your choice. It should work with a vanillla xmrig miner out-of-the-box. Please note that while we discover Townforge blocks easily, the current likelihood of catching a Monero block with our pool is small due to difficulty differences.

Couple screenshots of how my gaming desktop's performing:


I'm hoping to soon post a recap of the past couple weeks, in-game story/event scripts, as well as showcase an R statistical software package that I've been working on that interacts with the Townforge daemon RPC and should provide all the spreadsheet warriors a healthy chunk of data to chew on from gamestate, e.g. NFTs, game markets, events, etc. It comes with a browser interface built with R Shiny. R is great for data visualizations, statistics, etc, so I'm hoping this package will come in handy as a supplement to the game client.

Further, we've been seriously discussing a mainnet launch, though nothing final has been decided yet. But stay tuned.

To give some point of reference, since this is an economy based game, Aren's castle shown in Syksy's post above cost:
- Land: 34.3 gold
- Materials: 11.3k sandstone, 30k pine, 210k labour. At full price, this sets you back about 182 gold
Total: about 216 gold

This building currently gets an income of 66 gold per tick (4 times a day) against a puny land tax of about 0.05 gold.
It really is a no brainer as the castle pays itself back in less than a single day. Of course, this is because there's very few players so far, which means the treasury emission gets shared among those very few people. When mainnet starts, we expect people to join early so they can share in the bounty too.

The stonecutter adjacent to the castle cost:
- Land: 30.6 gold
- Materials: 23.5k sandstone, 23.5k pine, 282k labour, so about 442 gold at full price
Total: about 473 gold

The stonecutter does not get automatic income as the castle does. Instead, it produces stone blocks, which you can use to build your other buildings cheaper, or sell to others, undercutting the full price supply. This particular stonecutter gets you 738 sandstone per tick (4.4 gold), using up 306 pine and 3.8k labour (1.83 gold), leaving you with a 2.57 profit per tick (assuming same price as above). A lot less than the castle, right ? But this production stays constant, while the income from the castle will go down as more people join the game, get building and start sharing in the treasury emission.

Now, this is a bit more complex than that, I did not count costs of food and heating material, and this is something you should get familiar with on testnet while there is still time before mainnet launch.

Just to acknowledge Sigrid, as it may not have been clear from the context yet; Sigrid is Moneromooo's BCT account, for Townforge communication purposes (Sigrid Sigrúnarsdóttir is Mooo's TF character and mayor of the founding city). So when (s)he posts with this account, (s)he's basically writing as the sole person behind Townforge's current software implementation and in charge of its Git repo, among many other things.

As he's been an active contributor to the XMR project (like so), Townforge forking from Monero was quite a natural choice - but do note TF has diverged a lot from its origins.

Android/iPhone:
Android/iPhone would be nice (OK, I'd love it to happen), but I'm not going to do it myself. If someone with the right skills shows up, it's a free software project, patches will definitely be considered. Both Monero and Urho3D work on those platforms so making Android/iPhone builds should not be a huge undertaking, it just needs someone familiar with the platforms and the processes for the app stores.

NFTs:
NFTs are possible. A player can create custom items and item groups at will. Those are then tradable, giftable and generally usable as other items. They can also be destroyed by whoever owns them at the time. The in game UI is not great at the moment, but it'll get better in time.

You mention building, so you might have been thinking of land and 3D buildings: these are tradable and giftable too, and also destroyable, and very definitely non fungible. They can also be mortgaged to raise further funds or auctioned. I'm not quite sure what you're after so if you want to ask a more precise question I can answer that.

There's also the collectible gold coins, which are in a category between fungible and non fungible: there's a number of designs and a collection game mechanic. Coins may be minted for a game year (a real week) after a design is released (automated game function), and coins are fungible within their design, but different designs have their own age (older coins are more valuable), gold content (heavier coins are more valuable), etc.

As an example, if you wanted to create, say, a set of items representing every Pokemon, you'd create a "Pokemon" custom item category, then a new item for each Pokemon in that category. You can then sell then on the Townforge marketplace. There's no image assigned to player items currently (there's a possibility for abuse) but it'd be nice to have that at some point.

PVP/PVE:
There's no direct conflict in this game. There is no representation of a player in the 3D world, only the land and buildings. You cannot loot another player's belongings. The most you can do is position your land and configure your buildings to give penalties to other players' buildings (and of course snap up the most productive land for yourself).
I'm planning a system of "feasts" for later, which will bring some extra competition between towns, but this will still be nowhere near PvP.

Now, Townforge is an economic game, so there's a lot of scope for economic based competition, including the embedded decentralized marketplace, the auction system, the mortgage mechanics, etc. A shrewd player will be able to exploit any mispricing in those areas, and since pricing will depend in large part on player interactions and other dynamic factors, I expect money will be made and lost there. But it's still no PvP

Other blockchain:
I considered using Monero to start with, since it's what I'm familiar with. However, two main reasons made me use a new chain:
- the game is actually embedded on the chain, rather than using a chain to pay for in-game items, so this would have required consensus changes to Monero - a no go
- I don't want to spam the Monero chain with game transactions which would weight the chain down forever

I already have a chain I'm familiar with, being one of the main Monero contributors, so that's what I went with. I am able to make any modifications I need without being dependent on anyone else for it.

Forgot to add #4

4. Have you considered using an existing blockchain that allows sidechains like Cardano (as I am most familiar with Cardano, I am going to hypothesize based on using that chain)?

Many top 100 projects have development grants which you can get access to by community voting. This could help speed up project development. Cardano will be giving away milllions of dollars USD in grants this year to bootstrap projects.

Using Cardano would allow you to take advantage of and piggyback off of their $100 million in previous development. They are rolling out smart contracts very soon. On March 3rd they are putting multi-currency support on the mainnet. This will allow you to rollout your own currency that is able to fully utilize all tools that Cardano has and will ever develop, as well as use Cardano's NFT support, smart contracts, multicurrency, etc.

Most importantly, you immediately have the support of hundreds of thousands of ADA stakers who would want to help your project thrive.

/4

Again, can't wait to hear more. Good luck.

Congratulations on such an ambitious project. I love MMOs, and have not played one for years due to the general suckiness involved. I hope you can help revive my fondness for them.

I have a few questions.

1. Mobile/ Android: do you have plans to develop this for Android and release on the Google Play store? Since its built for Apple, I am assuming the Apple Store is in the future?

2. NFTs: How will you be utilizing NFTs? If this is a world-building game that presumably allows destruction as well as building, how will that impact NFTs?

3. PVP/ PVE: How is that going to work? If you are creating a game where cryptocurrency is on the line, and players can loot from each other, PVP sounds like a dangerous consideration. I see lawyers of lured/ PKed people in that future.

Can't wait to learn more.

Year 953 (third week of v0.27 testnet) has dawned upon Townforge. Helsengaard, its founding city, has grown to be a sprawling city of level 3, allowing 2 city specializations. Rumor has it that some of the players are saving money to found a second city, with the current cost of 2nd city sitting at roughly 144k TFG (to give perspective, I currently own 80k "liquidity" in Townforge gold, and built an expensive 300 Economical Power commercial building that cost me well over 50k just now):




Advent of testnet v0.27 brought us new eager players, and I wanted to highlight three in particular; Powis Belorc, Aren Erand Hegeweard, joined by Dorik in building their very own city district.

To welcome them, I built a road leading from the main city square to their own city district. I'm currently working on a video to showcase how I used premade 32x32 VOX building blocks to quickly build a road leading to their district; but the results can be seen in-game:




Powis and the others have embarked on a task to start their own production of higher tier materials. Here's a glimpse of Belorc's quarry right at the entrance:




Their city district is full of fine details, which I find inspiring. Even the roads are not bland slabs; here's a highlight on some of the decorations Dorik's done for roads:




Aren's been a very prolific builder, with extremely fine details in many of his/her buildings. Many of them are placed inside the buildings, so it's hard to capture them if not on video - for example the castle holds many intriguing details within its walls. Here's an example of creative melding of multiple lots together; the castle is to the top-left, flawlessly connects to a stone quarry in the middle segment, with a bridge leading to the sawmill to the right. All of them built with fine details allowing 1st person walker mode exploration:




A lot of details are hidden inside the buildings, as exemplified here via a glimpse from the door at Dorik's Golden Horseshoe Inn:




I haven't been sitting idle either. My biggest in-game feat this past week was creation of new 64x64 pixel art to my very own pixel art museum. This piece is called the 'Bloodmoon' (yes, it's made manually with in-game tools - I might make it into a video as I have the footage of its construction):




What is intriguing also for us, is that as the game progresses, we - the creators - also learn of our own game and its emergent economy. Given the question "how much is a Sapphire worth"? No clue, out of the blue. It's a special item that can be mined via a random chance by stonecutters, if the stonecutter lies on top of a gem vein. It gives a bonus to prestige, which will result in subsidies every game tick (i.e. every 360 blocks). But what is the worth of it? A lot of factors play into it, and there's no correct answer; same with patents, which I priced based on my initial investment (and giving lenience naturally, as we're experimenting on economical balance in the testnet):




... and naturally, all the presented constructions, market transactions, special game events, and even game communication (via non-mineable txes) are part of the blockchain and decentralized network. Oh yeah, and by achieving milestones in the game ("badges"), you can unlock the seen new materials and these custom chat colours, etc.

Perhaps in the next game year (corresponding roughly to a real-life week depending on block discovery rate) we'll see a second city rising in the testnet! Winter's cold, food is running low - hopefully everybody's stocked up on firewood as well as vegetables, grain, and (salted) meat, lest we see Helsengaard shrink in population and the 2nd city's viability become but a fleeting dream...

Tech-wise, main highlight is the advent of v0.27.0.6, which fixed an issue related to network splintering.

How will early mainnet play out ?

While it's impossible to tell for sure, I expect the following when mainnet starts:

- Since about 9% of the total emission lands in town treasuries, early players will get a larger slice of that pie until more players sign up and start playing

- Building materials can be obtained at a high price from the game, and it will take a bit of time before players have set up substantial wood and stone producing industry and start undercutting the game's "last resort" wood/stone supply, so cost to build will start dropping after a delay

The first point favours early adopters, while the second one disfavours them. Regardless of which one ends up taking precedence, it seems safe to say that the people who have been playing on testnet to get to know the rules and get a feel for the game dynamics will be at a significant advantage, at least until newer players get the hang of it too.
   
If you decide to check it out before mainnet, here are are few things you'll want to have looked into as they are instrumental to an efficient play style:
   
- Farming timing and amount: grain and vegetables only grow when temperature is high enough, and crop damage happens when it drops too low, keeping on eye on season and temperature is a must if you specialize in farming.

- Ground potential maps: some locations are good sources of stone, others have more stable ground, or more fruitful land for farming, or grow different types of trees. You'll want to make sure you build your structures on land that lends itself well to your   buildings' types.

- Prestige: prestige accrues to players with the most impressive collection of gold coins, as well as most in game achievements. Four times a day, the twenty most prestigious players get a gold bonus on top of what income they earn through their buildings and other endeavours. Keeping your prestige up will be a great way to ensure money flows back to you.

- Inter building dynamics: this is probably the most complex part of the game mechanics: buildings influence each other: you get bonuses (or penalties) depending on which building types (whether your own or not) are close to your own buildings. You will learn how to place buildings in locations where bonuses are the best to maximize income. This can lead to impromptu player interactions: alliances where players cooperate to place each others' buildings in mutually advantageous locations, or conflict where players can even attempt to give other people's buildings certain penalties.

And there's much more! When you've checked out these, you may want to look into player created custom items, loans and mortgages, or creating your own city with a different map and 3D topography and its own specializations.

Thank you Jason! I remember your creations in v0.23 testnet. They were really impressive and made me really happy - somebody is excited enough out there, to spend time making these marvelous creations! I have all your buildings stored by the way (or most at least) as VOX files, which is the voxel format for importing and exporting 3D structures in the game. So your creations did not disappear with the testnet, they can be rebuilt

Would be great to have you back and see what cool stuff you'd come up with! I understand life is busy (and voxel creations do take time), but the doors to Townforge are open!

I'm looking at my VOX files, and I see that at least the following buildings that you created and I stored the VOX files for:
- Academy
- Bakery
- Building of Culture
- East Monero Estate
- Forest
- Gemmy Caves
- Pavillion
- Sudodd Square
- Town Aqueduct
- Watchtower

Let me know if you want the VOX files, or if you allow, I can import them into the game and gift the lots to you (or keep them on my account with name like "Jason's Academy"). It's creations like these that make me excited to have been part of this


Yes, I can guarantee that we don't intend to pose some kind of linear, spoon-fed roleplay lore to people. It's intended to be open-ended. As in, we might encourage role playing, provide the context, hopefully incentives and so forth, but the "story" itself would be ideally created by the players themselves ex tempore.

Hmm, and yes - role playing can be both an opportunity as well as a threat. We don't intend to force it on people; instead, it's more of an option that's out there for those that wish to participate in it.
I myself have game mastered the old-school like role playing games such as Call of Cthulhu. So it may be that I do have quite a traditional view of what "role play" really means. Mooo always says my stuff is grim, maybe because my focus has been on Lovecraftian horror

I am familiar with ARMA 3, but not GTA RP or Altis; I played ARMA 3 briefly with a friend, but it was too much hardcore military simulator for me to enjoy. If I recall right, the campaign we tried to play as co-op got bugged and I haven't played since (he's a big fan though, always when I see or talk to him he has map editors open and whatnot).

It'd be interesting to hear how these differ from say, the traditional D&D type of adventuring we do intend to have more sophisticated role playing and preliminary decided on having no supernatural elements (though the people may believe in "gods" etc). Ideally the types of role play elements desired would stem from the community, so we're more than happy to hear suggestions!

Hey there,


It's not. It's a totally new game, running with its own engine, chain, game rules, etc. The game is in the blockchain itself: every player action is a transaction on the chain, which means that if you have the blockchain, you can recreate the entire history of the game, and verify that every action was within the game rules.


Not so simple: anyone can download it and roam around the world. In order to perform actions, however, you need some in game currency - gold - which is either mined or bought off someone else. This system is central to Townforge: most money you spend performing actions (such as buying land, creating a new building, etc) is stored in the town treasuries, and town treasuries regularly trickle back into players' accounts based on how well they are doing in game, so players who play the game well will in fact earn money. But they will have to pay money first, in order to build the structures that will get them this income stream. Moreover, about 9% of the currency issuance is also directed to the town treasuries, which will also trickle back into players' accounts. There are various other ways to get money in the game, so whether you pay to play or get paid to play depends on how you play (and you can choose your specialization: whether it's building structures that get you income, or playing the decentralized in-game markets, or creating stone or wood producing buildings on juicy locations, etc).


Townforge is a decentralized game. There's no central server. There is a seed node as in many other cryptocurrencies, but it is not necessary for gameplay, just to be able to find other peers on the network. Every node in the Townforge network receives actions from other players (in the form of transactions), and validates them. Mining those actions into the chain makes the game tick. Run the Townforge node and you are part of the decentralized "game server", so to say.

This implies that your in game possession are safe: there's no central server to be taken down, no admins with access to a central database who could alter it, etc. If your in game balance is 1500 gold, it will stay 1500 gold unless either you withdraw it (automated, it's just a blockchain transaction too, you don't ask a central party to send it back to you like you would on an exchange for example) or game rules mandate it (eg, paying land tax at game updates). If you created some custom items in game, you have them until you sell/give/destroy them. If you have a nice plot of land near the town square, no other player or admin or the like can take it from you. Because these things would be against the game rules, and every node, including yours, validates actions.

This implies that your in game possession are safe: there's no central server to be taken down, no admins with access to a central database who could alter it, etc. If your in game balance is 1500 gold, it will stay 1500 gold unless either you withdraw it (automated, it's just a blockchain transaction too, you don't ask a central party to send it back to you like you would on an exchange for example). If you created some custom items in game, you have them until you sell/give/destroy them. If you have a nice plot of land near the town square, no other player or admin or the like can take it from you. Because these things would be against the game rules, and every node, including yours, validates actions.

So if I were to get hit by a bus, then the seed node crashes, Townforge would still continue ticking happily as long as there are miners on the network.

I have played this game and appreciated it quite a bit a few months back. It compiled well, ran reasonably well with little issues and the players and people developing it were incredibly helpful and knowledgeable. At this time I sense nor expect any sort of deception and your efforts seem to be a genuine effort to move on from what may or may not have set you on this game in the first place.

I continue to find excitement in the concept of this to this day but as of this minute my schedule does not allow for the creation of further Mushroom Farms, Courtrooms, Aqueducts or Pavillions on the Hill .. though I do anticipate that day will come again soon.

Thank you, for your efforts here. Had this been the known and expected end result of all those years ago possibly I would have had a different approach toward it all.

I thought the color scheme was well chosen, and when plugged into a building system that was well designed and reasonably easy to understand and capable of extending the players ability to build in a blocky minecraft world greatly. Moreso, it was quite relaxing and represented most everything I would expect of this style of game.

I appreciate the extent to which a blockchain has been built into the core of what makes this thing work.

I think that at this stage, possibly stressing that the game is designed to be role-played by the player and that they aren't being force fed some story line that someone has dreamed up and put into a rigid logical structure all leading to the same end point might not be apparent enough to people who are looking to get into it after this being the norm found in many games.

Curious as I haven't asked before - have you any familiarity with modern-day role playing as such has been seen in some of the Grand Theft Auto RP, or even Arma 3/Altis RP and the like? There are extents that the developers go to in those games that don't lead to the Role itself being enforced upon a player that allows much storyline to develop driven a lot by the characters. Just trying to think of a middle ground here besides some kind of D&D stuff that might otherwise stand to provide a neat source of ideas for players and developers alike.

I really like gaming cryptos, especially ones which makes sense. I have a few questions.

Is it some kind of mod to Minecraft?
Is it free to play?
You guys hosting the servers, or anyone can create it?

Thank you for the valuable feedback & constructive criticism! We definitely need more comments like this.


I also grew up with UO, MUDs, and I have followed Runescape despite not actively playing it. Big influencer here has also been EVE Online, I should add. I remember unboxing my UO as a kid, which came with a cloth sheet of Bretonnia's map, a pin, and all other goodies - firing up my game to enter a vast, immersive world familiar to me from the Ultima series with Lord British himself making appearances, and myself in the world able to carve my own destiny and mold it to my liking or at least make a little dent to steer the course of Bretonnia. I can relate to your main point of criticism: making the game easily approachable so that there's low threshold fun to be had, e.g. jump into a medieval RPG and go bash some skulls in an arena, or embark on an dragon slaying adventure for some dank loot. Games are one thing, having a "2nd job to play" is an another thing.

I think how Townforge differs fundamentally from many of the other crypto-games presented also here on BCT, is that the game itself truly is crypto. Many of the platforms we've seen when scouting out crypto games are basicly bundles of games implemented centrally, with a decentralized cryptocurrency connecting the input and output of currency in said games. A bit like, the blockchain itself is not the game, it's just the poker chips that you move from table to table in a casino, where the tables reside in centralized servers functioning in real-time. Townforge instead implements the "poker table"; all the moves, actions, etc, are stored precisely in the blockchain, and the chips that go with them.

This does impose some restrictions. A game that is stored elsewhere and just interacts with the cryptocurrency interface to give people credit is much more free to implement e.g. real-time interactions. In Townforge, with a block storing all the actions in the game and a target time of 1 minute discovery rate per block, for example real time movement required for combat or seeing other player characters move around is rendered impractical. Economics-wise Townforge resembles perhaps games like Banished (resource management and overall theme) or Cities: Skylines.

I think abstraction-wise Townforge and the UO-type games do also have one big distinction: in UO you play on a "micro level", as a single character, with your character's assets and attributes. In Townforge, we're working more on a macro level, where a player is actually an aggregate of individuals and represents a set of structures, and the population that inhabits them (and e.g. has to take care of them to fight famine and cold). In this sense mentioning UO might trigger a false impression, that one embarks on an individual-level adventure, collecting loot and slowly progressing in terms of combat, spellcasting, crafts skills, etc. In reality, Townforge might resemble said city simulation games, with a mix of Minecraftian building mechanics. We're currently trying to address the issue of "individual-level immersiveness" by implementing text-based quests with choice & consequence via a custom scripting language in the near future, but I acknowledge this is a long stretch from games like UO or Runescape.

I have been trying to fondle the idea of conflict and war, which currently don't exist in the game. I've mostly been inspired by ideas stemming from games such as Travian and Planetarion, persistent web browser games genre that started popping up in early to mid 2000s. Basically you were a village chief (former) or an emperor of a galactic superpower (latter); since the games were running persistently on 24/7 basis and you could conquer new land (or solar systems), build new structures (or starbases), research tech, form alliances etc, the conflict that does draw people's interest also functioned on a macro level with time systems that could work also on blockchain level. For example, in Travian you could see that a competing clan has declared war on you, and within 48h hostilities would begin. Based on vague geographic coordinates, one could send raid parties of various composition to pillage and loot or conquer land - you could for example see an incoming warband arriving to your land in 8 hours, and a vague report of their composition given by your scouts. In Planetarion, the composition of an attacking (and defending) space fleet would be simulated by the game upon conflict, and outcome would result in e.g. solar systems being captured or other interesting consequences rising from conflict. It will remain to be seen whether we have the resources, time or creativity to implement such ideas.


Thanks once again for an important pointer. The genre you're referring to is definitely more approachable to a gaming audience, but it might be too much of a leap to go that way at this point for our two-man indie team where we both have "primary dayjobs". We definitely went a long way already prior to making this announcement, so it wasn't made lightly; currently we'd need more engagement from a community, including play-testing and balancing. There's loads of people looking for easy hand-outs, and only very few who are willing to or capable of contributing anything of practical use.

We've been trying to create a hybrid unique to our own liking, but it's always a bit risky to go our way, especially on a unique decentralized platform going with fully open source and transparency in the project has definitely also made this a long journey already, especially for Mooo who has been carrying the weight of the software implementation.

It's a fun idea.  As a gamer though, it doesn't look very fun.  I loved the game Ultima Online growing up, I like it inspires you as well.  I think it needs some serious work though like maybe a bit more should have been developed before release, if you could create a fun game-like Runescape or Ultima online, you might be onto something.  Not everyone wants to craft cities in Minecraft as well, so it shouldn't revolve around your game, plus your target audience will be mainly adults.  It's very awesome it's open-source, kudos for that!  I'll follow you.  Good luck.