Current status
What exists today
Living World currently exists as an organised game design, a growing set of system contracts, public explanations, research, and two maintained local prototypes. There is no downloadable game, public test build, live account service, or running player-built world yet.
In Postal Sort, a player can now match six parcel marks to district bins against a short service window. A longer adjusted route and an untimed no-dexterity route preserve access without reducing the ordinary range of possible world contribution. The companion settlement prototype can receive a synthetic delivery condition and lets the player choose between efficient routine stocking, a cautious reserve, or local substitutes. These are modest experiments, not a small empire wearing a fake moustache.
What has become clearer
The intended foundation is now defined: a natural Earth where players create the human history; separate games that exchange only small, safe effects; a Central world service that owns the lasting facts; a web-first approach for smaller games; and firm fallbacks so a quiet or abandoned game cannot stop everyone else.
What the first test should show
The immediate product milestone is to put this actual loop in front of first-time players. We need to learn whether they understand the challenge, choose to play another round, notice the settlement consequence, and can distinguish a local result from a queued or accepted world effect. The technical tests already cover offline completion, safe retries, malformed-data refusal, and neutral fallback; they cannot tell us whether anyone enjoys the shift or understands why the settlement changed.
What comes after that
Only evidence from the prototype should decide which systems deserve expansion. A successful test would justify deeper work on accounts, geography, city stewardship, transport, population scaling, accessibility, and additional games. A confusing or fragile test would be a reason to simplify the design—not to hide the problem beneath several continents of decorative roads.
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.
How the Shared World Connects
The central Living World service does the difficult work: it keeps track of Earth, eras, settlements, markets, roads, history, and the combined results of many players. Individual games remain focused on their own play and communicate through small, stable agreements about what they may send and receive.
Games ask; the world decides
A game sends a request such as a delivery result, a proposed city claim, or a completed road improvement. The central service checks the request, records the accepted fact once, updates the relevant part of the world, and prepares new information for the games that need it.
For example, a shop game might receive "more wealthy customers this evening" instead of the entire history of the city, every trade route, and thousands of raw scores. A city builder may receive a road-demand indicator, while a later-era game receives only the historic trace that survived.
The service updates the world in clear steps so games see a coherent state rather than half of one calculation. Read-only views can be rebuilt from accepted history if a temporary copy is lost, and delayed requests keep their honest status instead of being rewritten as if they always succeeded.
This separation keeps each game simpler and safer. A minigame can be repaired, replaced, or temporarily unavailable without rebuilding the world, and the world can change its heavy calculations without forcing every game app to download all of its internal data.