Welcome

What it is

Living World is a planned family of games that share one evolving Earth. Some games may be quick arcade challenges, while others may let players build cities, run transport companies, manage shops, or make political decisions. Each game should make sense on its own, but its results can leave small traces in the same shared world.

The world begins with Earth's natural geography but without its human history. Players create settlements, roads, businesses, institutions, and connections in different eras. What survives from one period may become a foundation, ruin, useful route, local tradition, or modest advantage in a later game.

Why it matters

Most connected-game ideas ask players to join one enormous game or learn one enormous rulebook. Living World tries a different approach: let people choose the kind of play they enjoy, then let the difficult world calculations happen quietly behind the scenes. Cooperation should make the world richer and more surprising, but nobody's game should stop because another game is quiet or another player leaves.

What a player might see

A postal player might improve delivery reliability. A tavern player might lift a neighbourhood's mood. A transport player might discover that a city has upgraded the road beneath a profitable route. Years—or centuries—later, another player might find that an old road still gives a small construction advantage. Players see understandable opportunities and consequences, not the continental accounting department that produced them.

Where it honestly stands today

Living World is still in design and prototype planning. There is no playable public build, live player-built Earth, account service, or operating shared-world server yet. The first goal is a small playable test that proves one complete journey from a short game, through the world service, to a visible settlement effect and a later historical trace.

This site describes the intended product and the work needed to test it. Explore Topics for individual systems and game ideas, Current Status for the immediate plan, or the Developer Blog for dated accounts of what has actually happened.