Games and Prototypes
These pages explain how Living World's first games can be organised, tested, and expanded. Related minigames may share convenient collection apps, while larger experiences can grow into their own releases when their technology or audience requires it.
The first playable slice begins with two very different short games connected to one settlement and a later glimpse of its history. That small chain is intended to prove the shared-world promise before the catalogue grows into dozens of games.
Minigame Collections
Related minigames can live together in a few well-organised collection apps. Players get one convenient place to discover, download, and switch between them instead of managing a separate store app for every short activity.
The collection can provide common sign-in, accessibility settings, offline rules, updates, notifications, and Living World connections. Each minigame still keeps a clear identity and play loop, so the collection feels like a welcoming arcade or district rather than a bag of unrelated buttons.
For example, tavern, shop, delivery, and festival games might share one "Life in the City" app. A large city builder could still receive its own app if its size, controls, audience, technology, release schedule, or age rating makes that genuinely better.
The First Playable Test
The first playable Living World test connects two short games to one player-built settlement on the blank Earth. It is deliberately small enough to finish and examine, but complete enough to prove the most important connection from play to world to later history.
Two games, two kinds of contribution
Postal Sort tests whether a quick accuracy-and-speed result can safely reach the world and improve a modest settlement service. Tavern Slide adds a very different aiming game whose successful rounds may create a small local mood effect.
The settlement view shows those present-day effects without exposing the central calculation. A player might see more reliable deliveries or a slightly happier evening, while the games receive clear receipts showing whether their contributions were accepted.
A later-era view then shows what may survive—such as continuity, decline, foundations, or ruins. Together the pieces test identity, geography, offline limits, world updates, population scaling, readable feedback, and historical influence without pretending to be the finished world.
Where it honestly stands today
Postal Sort and a small settlement receiver now exist as local implementation-readiness prototypes. Postal Sort has a bounded accuracy-and-speed challenge: match six parcel marks during a service window, with a longer adjusted route and an untimed no-dexterity route. Overtime still permits completion, and speed affects only local points—not shared-world influence. The receiver now offers a small reversible trade-off in which dependable deliveries favour routine stocking while unreliable deliveries can make reserves or local substitutes more useful.
Automated checks can complete a shift offline, keep a world contribution separate from the local reward, reject malformed or misbound synthetic projections, pass an accepted synthetic result into the receiver, and leave the settlement usable when world data is missing or stale. This is stronger playable-slice evidence, but it is still not a released game or public beta. No first-time player has yet supplied the human evidence needed to establish comprehension, accessibility, comfort, or voluntary replay interest. Real phones, production services, and actual world balance also still have to earn their ticks on the clipboard.