shadow.bbs

Working on visualizing the procgen via leaflet to render my district polygons and then fill them with districts which contain a grid of chunks that get procedurally mixed based on a bunch of rulesets. The colored lines are the road networks, based on real OSM and GIS data!

Working on visualizing the procgen via leaflet to render my district polygons and then fill them with districts which contain a grid of chunks that get procedurally mixed based on a bunch of rulesets. The colored lines are the road networks, based on real OSM and GIS data!

oo! We should share notes on how webtransport is working out for you. phx channels are great, but leave some to be desired.

Most everything is Phoenix framework, some Ecto, and that's really it. nothing super fancy. There's some affordances for like, Horde (clustering) and stuff like that. I also got vite working with phoenix, which was non-trivial.

Working on world generation and client rendering today as a way to avoid replaying the video over and over and over and etc you get it, AMA about shadowrun, seattle in 2050, elixir, typescript, three.js or whatever, and i'll do my best.

This was my bad! i pushed a change last night and forgot to reboot services. Things are back online! Join the discord if you'd like! I'd love to have ya

multiplayer test up and running at shadows.gamedev.company if you want to test out multiplayer features with me. I'm in downtown.

#devlog #screenshotsaturday #indiedev #solodev #shadowrun

A screenshot depicting a dashboard of various tools for an mmorpg

Shadows 0.18.0 released! lots of goodies for meeeee, sneak peak at some of the tooling

Hey chummers, we had to wipe the prod user account data due to some breakage + adding some additional security around vaulting / encrypting all user data with a non-reversable salted hash. Sorry but also not.

0.1.6 release today! get hype #shadowrun #mmorpg #solodev #elixir #threejs

character creator almost finished. Need to swap out the placeholder out and make sure i18n and stuff. Who wants some screenshots?

As always, unstable builds now at shadowrun.fly.dev/game/ if you would like to go reserve your account. Settled on 2E rules for now. #gamedev #cyberpunk #webgame

The point here with all this; directors (dragons) produce -pressure- on the simulation, pushing it in a particular direction, looking for entropy in the sim and "throwing a molotov" in some cases. Others, you may be working for a johnson owned by a dragon and never know it. Until its too late.

“A ghost in the Matrix.”
Otaku appear. Deckers investigate. Corps deny everything.
Reality gets thin.

“Power failures in Downtown.”
Transport slows. Wageslaves panic. Lone Star deploys drones.
PCs smell opportunity.

This manifests as these gradients of narrative storytelling:
“Aztechnology is hunting a traitor.”
Gangers lie low. Fixers demand hazard pay. Deckers go sniffing the LTGs.
Corps raise Matrix security levels.

Every agent consumes information.
Each agent makes decisions based on their personality (a kind of bitpacked genome) which inflates to over a thousand different traits that influence how it interprets information across the simulation. this means needs (money, safety, cred, drugs, purpose…)

The Sprawl isn’t driven by scripts.
It’s driven by information gradients.

These gradients are built from packets driven by dragons via rumors, news reports, intercepted comms, fixers’ whispers, ganger graffiti, corporate memos, Matrix anomalies, decker logs, astral sightings, street rumors, etc

“Why are the Yakuza suddenly pushing into Redmond?”
“Why did this runner get ambushed?”
“Why did the LTG grid spike with anomalies?”

These are "information packets" -- created by dragons (directors). Information packets don’t force world changes — they seed them.

It represents things in the simulation. things like e.g; economic pressures, faction movements, crime clusters, player actions, NPC motivations & rumors, stresses in the RTG/LTG/Matrix layers, unmet needs

and this thing i'm coining: “narrative gradients” (more later)

A dragon's currency is information. In fact, because this is an immersive sim, and because information is the core currency of that simulation, /verified/ information is priceless. How does information get verified? That's where the rationalization step comes in, but first, that information?

The Director is the shape of a particular actor in our simulation. Think of Dunkelzahn or Lofywr; power players of the sixth world unlike anything we've ever seen. They know everything about the sixth world, because they must.

What does a dragon do?

The Director in Shadows plays an analogous role:

It does not dictate the simulation. It _interprets it_, frames it, nudges it, and ensures the world’s emergent behavior feels intentional, coherent, and narratively charged. How? Well, with shadowrun, never deal with a dragon....

A huge shoutout to @unormal.bsky.social and @jfg.land for the inspiration for this idea, and for helping it all come to life. <3

In Caves of Qud, procgen doesn't create the world, it justifies it through history.
Events are emergent, but the game backfills meaning so the world feels authored.

Welcome to the sprawl.
It is very much alive.
And it’s waiting for you.

~sysop
--- END TRANSMISSION

Players, too:
We’ll be running early tests where everything breaks, nothing is balanced, and the world is raw.
If you like being part of the primordial soup of a new universe, we want you.

And yes — this is open for co-development! I would love nothing more than collaborators who are into the idea and want to help make it come alive.
Coders, writers, 3D people, Shadowrun lore-heads… -- we have a discord! discord.gg/V4nrGEE9Nr

We’re not chasing nostalgia.
We’re chasing the moods those old games gave us:
The feeling of wandering a living world, unsure of what’s scripted and what’s emergent.
Not knowing if the bartender is an NPC or a human.
Not knowing if that rumor is real.
Not knowing if you’re safe.

Everything — the street, the LTGs, the grid, the corporate hosts — is simulated by actor processes.
Tens of thousands of them.
Each ticking under a supervision tree that never sleeps.
When you jack out, the world doesn’t pause.
The sprawl keeps moving without you. The information never stops moving.

We’re building the Matrix the same way:
Not a menu.
Not a mini-game.
A parallel universe layered over Seattle, where your mind is another actor with its own body, physics, and enemies.
Two bodies.
Two risks.
One continuous identity.

“Information is the atomic unit of the Sixth World.”
Give an NPC a piece of intel — a rumor, a sighting, a betrayal — and their entire trajectory adjusts.
Fixers raise prices.
Gangers posture.
Johnson’s hire quietly.
Corps investigate.
Players feel the ripple.