Reserving second post.

Glad you like the concept! Indeed, everything revolves around the crypto embedded into Townforge

There's basically there's two sides to the gameplay inspired by MC:
1) There's the Minecraftian-like hybrid of a voxel builder, which allows the creative freedom of "Creative mode" in MC (i.e. you can freely move in the world, you don't take fall damage etc), but with limitations due to the economy (instead of having to go down deep into mines to work with your pickaxe in "Survival mode", it's the in-game currency, player-driven markets and production mechanics that determine your available block types and quantity).
2) Couple this with survivalism (food, warmth, other upkeep) and RPG potential, and you've got a world revolving around the creations. We acknowledge that not every wants to create voxel-based 3D buildings, so it's also possible to play just the economical side of the game - or, you can hire an another player to work as your architect, export their creations as VOX files etc.

... naturally we don't try to reproduce "a crypto-MC", but leverage the parts that make our game unique and interesting while drawing inspiration from the gaming world. Having the game on a blockchain is challenging on some fronts (for example, no redstone circuitry or real-time physics), but makes other parts more intriguing (for example, there is an intricate economy revolving around the blocks).

We currently have a scripting language in the works that'll allow players to embark on quests; this scripting language allows old-school text-based adventures with flavor images, and all those quests are pushed into the chain in a custom scripting language. The rewards come from the Game account, so nothing is created out of thin air. We're hoping that this will allow us to create an immersive RPG side to the game and deepen the Norse-based lore peppered by our own creative freedom.
Some rather recent games with similar quest mechanics are e.g. the game series Sunless Seas & Sunless Skies.

We're focusing on this RPG-adventuring aspect at the moment as well as general game balance. Hopefully we'll soon have adventures to showcase!

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.