Starting Experiment 2

In short: Experiment 2 is an action RPG for PC VR, built on what Experiment 1 has proven. There's no code yet. So far there are five planning documents and three decisions, and this entry says what they are.

Where it came from

Experiment 1 is a VR roguelike. You go out, clear rooms, and walk home with whatever you can carry. At the end of August I wrote down the other game I actually wanted to make:

very wide open areas with randomly generated objects, creatures, events, and treasure. And I hopefully want it to be multiplayer, so it would be useful for armor customization.

That note became Experiment 2. It isn't a replacement. Experiment 1 carries on, and a lot of what gets built there is now built with this second game in mind. The inventory grid is bigger than a roguelike needs, on purpose. Every armor slot carries sockets in its data, because in a game with other players, someone else sees your chest.

What it is meant to be

• Big generated areas: treasure, events, decoration and monsters dealt from seeds. It's the same approach Experiment 1 uses for its rooms, stretched over open ground.
• A town you build up. Upgrades make its people stronger and add features. They also draw attention, and the town gets attacked.
• Defense events that cost something without being cruel. Townsfolk are never lost, only out of action for a while. What you lose is items, and the materials you spend on repairs.
• The classic structure: quests, mini-bosses, side areas, loot, monsters.
• An optional endless dungeon, which is Experiment 1 embedded in the same world: a roguelike inside the RPG.

What carries over is the part I care most about. In Experiment 1 your swing is the damage roll: tip speed, the arc you swept, and a critical hit weighted by how good the swing was, all measured against your own arm. Loot is worth chasing because its stats are random and the best rolls are hard to get. Sharpening, socketing and rerolling are things you do with your hands, not menu picks. None of that is being redesigned. It's being lifted.

What's new is the town. Nothing in either project has built one yet, which makes it the riskiest part.

Three decisions so far

PC VR, not Quest standalone. Experiment 1 has to fit a Quest 3's mobile GPU, and a lot of its history is measuring frame time in milliseconds. Wide open areas on that budget would mean fighting the hardware for everything. Experiment 2 runs on a PC, so it can spend that headroom on the world.

Single-player first, built so it can become multiplayer. Multiplayer is the point, but networked VR melee is hard, and I don't want it standing between me and finding out whether the game is fun. So the first version is single-player on foundations that assume a second player will turn up later:

• the host owns the world;
• every networked thing has an identity;
• generation gives the same result on every machine from the same seed;
• how an item looks is stored as data, not baked in.

Co-op comes once grabbing and hitting feel right with the network in between. Which networking library to use is still open. Outside research narrowed it to two candidates, and I haven't chosen between them.

A fresh project, with Experiment 1's systems lifted into it. Experiment 2 starts from the same blank VR template Experiment 1 came from. Then the proven pieces get copied across: combat, loot, the grid and the testing harness. The bar is that each system is reused. It doesn't have to be a tidy package on day one. The connections can be messy at first.

The first playable slice

The first version to wear is deliberately small:

• one generated area;
• combat from Experiment 1;
• loot that drops and goes in the grid;
• a town with one building you can upgrade;
• a way out to the area and back.

It has to answer two questions. Is going out and coming home fun for twenty minutes? And does one building changing state feel like progress? If both answers are yes, the rest is content and systems on a base that works.

Not in the slice: quests, mini-bosses, defense events, the endless dungeon, and a flatscreen mode.

What's still open

A lot, on purpose:

• Flatscreen. In Experiment 1 your arm is the damage roll, and a mouse doesn't have one, so a flatscreen player needs a different answer.
• The setting.
• What dying costs.
• How your stash relates to what you carry.
• Whether levels and experience exist at all.

Each of these has options written up, with a recommendation I haven't accepted yet.

Nothing here has been played. When there is something to wear, it'll show up here.