Eggox, two months on: a home, a face and a house you can walk into

When I wrote the summer post on 7 September, Eggox lived at eggox.eggvelop.com, it had no logo, and the best thing you could do was walk along the quay and build furniture. Since then it has had 765 more commits, 1,084 in total, and a lot of them changed what Eggox looks and feels like, not just what it can do. So let me take you through the autumn in the order it happened.

Its own front door

On 10 September Eggox moved to its own address, eggox.net, with a landing page for the people who aren’t in yet, and staging.eggox.net became the dev world where I break things first. The same week the game got a door. Eggox is for players 18 and over, so everyone checks their age once, and we never ask for a date of birth. At first the check only took an ID document. By the end of September it was free, and your phone could answer instead: in Denmark the official age app does it anonymously and only tells us yes or no. Everyone also gets a space of their own, 48 by 48 tiles with a little beach, private until you open its gate.

Games inside the game

Mid September was the week I’d been waiting for since May. A room got a script, Lua running inside the BEAM, and on 13 September Crate Rush became the first game built that way. Then came Bomber, a real multiplayer match with a lobby, lives, pickups and chain reactions, then The Last Lighthouse and Ninja Skybound, and then Colour Clash, where you paint the arena. I built each of them to find out what a creator would be missing, and every one of them found something.

Here’s a small one that matters a lot. Every player who walks into a game brings a little budget of server time with them. If a game spends more than its players brought, it doesn’t drag the whole world down with it - it just runs a bit slower, on its own. It’s the same idea as the summer’s “time slows a touch instead of kicking anyone out”, only per game, and it’s what makes it safe to let anyone build one later.

Because that’s the honest part: players can’t make their own experiences yet. The tools work and I build with them, but for now making experiences is still ours alone, and it opens up for everyone later.

A face

On 25 September Eggox got its logo. I tried three voxel eggs first (Egg-O, Peek and Home), and the one that won is the word itself: EGGOX built out of cubes with an egg for the O, in brass with a white BETA under it. That same day the whole game moved into a new cream UI kit we call the game book, every window, button and toast of it, in one long day. And the next day the front page got two hosts, Pip, a hatchling lizard who still wears the top of his eggshell, and Tavi, an egg who knows every corner of the place. Click them and they answer!

The money, three times

This is the part that took the most tries. On 27 September Eggox had one money, Voxels. On 30 September it had no money at all, and every design was free to take. And on 9 October Voxels came back, this time with rules I believe in: drawing and every draft is free, publishing a finished design and claiming land cost Voxels, the game always shows what Voxels cost in real money, and things change hands by trading face to face or at a player’s stall. Nothing we sell is random, and betting is never allowed. Three economies in two weeks sounds messy, but the one that came out of it is the one I’d want to play in myself.

Faster, and see-through

In October the engine underneath got a lot of love. Everything in Eggox is voxels baked into pixel art, and on 3 October that bake moved to Rust, compiled to WebAssembly - the same pixels, about 3.5 times faster. The swarm came back too, this time 500 bots logging in as real dressed-up accounts, and the server took all of them. And the world learned to see through itself: walk under a deck or into a building and the things between you and the camera step aside, so you can actually see where you are.

Sounds, Discord and trophies

Late October was about everything around the game. Eggox got its own sounds. My first ones were way too complex, so they got simpler, and buying Voxels rings a till now. The Eggox Discord opened, with Pip and Tavi in it as bots, and as stickers baked from their own rigs in the game. And on 25 October building competitions arrived. The server runs them from start to finish: you stand in your place and press Submit, players rate the entries from one to five stars, and the top three win Gold, Silver and Bronze trophies made for that competition alone, with Voxel Eggs beside them. A trophy nobody can ever get again, sitting in your bag with the win on it - that’s the kind of thing I love about games.

This week

Travelling between places means a short wait while the next place builds, so now that wait is four tiny stories: Pip chasing a runaway egg, Tavi on her skateboard, an acorn rain, and Tavi and the beat. Pip also started bringing the post, rolling up with a wagon of whatever the game gives you. On 1 November the town got its first house you can walk inside: three storeys, stairs, doors and windows that open, a balcony and lights. Tiles can say what you do on them now, so you swim in water and dance on a dance floor. And today I rebuilt the website’s front page around the new logo, the one at the top of this post.

Where it is

It’s still a beta, and things change every week. You can’t make experiences yet. Some of what I built this autumn I took straight back out again (numbered copies of every item lasted two days). And it’s still me with an AI as a thinking partner, building a world one commit at a time.

But when I put the September page next to this one (I’ve kept it here, exactly as it was), it’s a different thing. Back then it was a quay you could walk along. Now it has a logo, two characters who say hi, games, competitions and a house you can walk into. The thing I dreamt about when I was eighteen has a front door now. Come knock, and if you build something, enter the next competition. I want to see it!