Eggox: what a summer of building a world looks like

When I wrote about Eggox back in July it was mostly a dream and a metro line. Since then it has had 315 commits, and about 280 of them landed in August alone. So let me tell you what actually got built, and then what I’m still chasing, because the vision is the part I care about most.

First, the vision in one breath

One persistent, browser-first world, pixel art, always online. You walk in, claim a plot, build a space, decorate it with items other people made, and script games that others can walk into. No download, no servers you get sorted into, no “world is full”. The new idea on top of that - the thing I haven’t seen anyone ship - is that a space isn’t just a room, it’s a vantage point. A DJ’s club can look into a 10,000-person dance floor experience and drop confetti across every instance of it. A battle royale can spit eliminated players into a talk-show lobby the host runs live. That boundary between hanging out and playing, made permeable and scriptable, is the whole bet.

And Elixir is what makes it feel possible. Every player, every object, every space is its own lightweight process, and when the crowd gets too big the world slows time a touch instead of kicking anyone out.

What got built, in order

July: a door. On 31 July the world got locked behind real accounts - signup, confirmation mail, the lot - and an admin world builder so the scenery could live in the database instead of hardcoded geometry.

11 August: the builder becomes real. Everything in the world is voxels baked to pixel art, and that week the whole world started rendering as one stitched voxel build. Floors became platforms you can raise into decks, bridges and storeys. Ctrl+C clones a thing. The block kit went live and the terrace rose.

12 to 14 August: the arrival. I built a plaza, then a castle - Castle Eggfall, four storeys, a throne hall, real fire, stairs you actually climb onto real levels. And then I cleared the entire world and started again. What replaced it is Dinant: a riverside town with a quay you stand on, canal houses each with their own gables and vines and hoists, and a mountain that holds the town. The screenshot at the top of this post is that quay. The castle taught me 3D movement, and the town is where people arrive now.

15 to 18 August: the crowd. This is the week I’d been scared of. I built a swarm rig that spawns fake players and keeps a scorecard, and then watched the server die at 300 players in one town. Fix one, serialize snapshots once. Fix two, one combined packet per cell tick. Fix three, a fast lane for movement. Then a binary wire - six bytes per move, no JSON in the hot path. Then a memory diet that hibernates idle players, 13 times cheaper per idle body. Then a queue that tells the truth: when the box is under memory pressure the door refuses politely and you wait in line with a real number counting down, instead of the whole thing falling over. Final scorecard: 2,000 players knocking on an undersized server, 1,007 inside, the rest queued, zero dead.

19 to 21 August: the economy, rewritten. Free creation, forever. One bought currency, and it buys other people’s work and cosmetic identity, never land and never the ability to build. Land is claimed once and held. Teleporter pairs, waygates, a navigator, a doorbell. The market became a catalog with aisles.

24 to 31 August: things. Furniture you arrange with the mouse and stack with a typed height. Mint a thing from the thing. Editions that split off a stack. A bucket you buy, name, fill, nest and plant. A stall to sell at, with bundles and a fine-print window. Three kinds of money. The studio became a workshop where you split any area and keep your bench.

September so far. Everyone starts somewhere: three starter looks, and a ghost for the naked. Authored animation clips became things you can do - sit, wave, sleep, swim a crawl, dance. Wearables are layers over the body. And on 1 September the studio grew an AI LINK: paste one URL into your own AI assistant and it edits the canvas you’re watching, live. That one I built because I use AI to build this, and I want creators to have the same partner.

What’s honest

It’s an early build. You can log in today at eggox.eggvelop.com, walk the quay, meet someone, build furniture in the studio and sell it at a stall. You can’t yet script a game, and the cross-vantage thing - the whole reason this exists - is still a design doc. The wedge I’m aiming at is smaller than the dream on purpose: a persistent town, your own plot, a few hundred pieces of furniture, chat and friends, free entry. That’s already a complete product. The editor, then minting, then experiences, then the scripted boundary come after, in that order.

And I’m one person with an AI as a thinking partner, on a server that’s deliberately too small so the code has to be honest. Some weeks that feels absurd. Most weeks it feels like the thing I dreamt about when I was eighteen is finally getting a shape. Come walk around, and tell me what you’d build.